


The Emperor's Assassin

by BatMads



Category: Original Work
Genre: Assassins, F/M, M/M, Original work - Freeform, Work In Progress, and redemption, grappling with ideas about self worth, idk - Freeform, on one wild misadventure, so...yay?, something I'm just fiddling with, teenage assassins, with a grumpy ace older assassin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-15 11:19:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11229870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BatMads/pseuds/BatMads
Summary: Alpha was always meant to be the first, the best. Groomed from a young age among a group of children selected from across the Empire, she is the head of theElitiaand favored, when the time comes, to become the Emperor's Assassin. But when the last trial goes horribly wrong, how far will Alpha be willing to go to regain he Masters' favor, and will it be at the cost of the allies she makes along the way?





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Hey so this is just something I've been ~casually~ working on whenever I have free time that's not consumed by working on other stuff. This sucker is no where near complete (although I do have a good chunk written) so unlike my other works, it won't be updated regularly. 
> 
> The reason why I'm breaking my don't-publish-until-you're-done rule is because I want   
> 1) Motivation to keep writing and   
> 2) Feedback on where I'm taking this, pacing, characters, etc. 
> 
> I'm not planning on abandoning this puppy, because I love all the characters dearly, but please know that it will probably take me a while to finish (Also, Muse won't be editing it as much since we're both more focused on WitS). 
> 
> So, with that...read at your own risk? I guess? It's kinda like "There is not a lifeguard on duty" situation here, so...

# Prologue

The first day of the trials, they had me kill my best friend to show that my only loyalty was to the emperor.

The second day, they had me stand on a high tower in the sun without food or water to show that I was brave and strong.

The third day, today, had been a labyrinth: a series of rooms and corridors designed to test my cunning and skill.  The first to make it through would be granted the position of the emperor’s assassin, the rest, the stragglers, would be killed, no matter how successful. I had been moving along at a fairly rapid pace, leaping over obstacles dodging traps, solving riddles as if it was child’s play. But for me, these trials had been long comings. As a member _Elitia,_ the elite school created to train the next blade of the emperor, these trials were all I had been training for my entire life.

I had been taken from me family when I was three, selected by the robed tutors of the _Elitia_ for the resilience I, the smallest, had shown when they had thrown the starving children of my village a moldy heel of bread. From that day on, I had lived, breathed, and dreamed of training for the trials. Whatever name I once had had been obliterated years ago. If I was to become the blade of the emperor, I must be nameless. The tutors at the school merely referred to me and my classmates by letter, which designated our rank. I had always been alpha. The first. The best.

It was this last room, or rather, what I was certain was the last room, that was giving me trouble. This room was no more or less ornate than any of the others I had passed through, except here, there was a table covered by a simple linen cloth. Two objects were upon the table: a golden hammer and a clear goblet that appeared to be filled with water. On the wall behind the table, someone had spelled out in clear, thick letters “Go ahead, make your choice. The outcome will decide whether you’re ready or not.”

The hammer was the obvious choice. As the symbol of the empire, it represents strength and power. But hammers are not tools of finesse and subtlety, skills that being the imperial assassin would require of me regularly. I may become the emperor’s blade, his tool for justice, but no act of mine can never be tied to him. The hammer, I know, is far too obvious, which makes the goblet a tantalizing choice.

Goblets, and the liquid they contain, are an easy vessel for poison. They are a way to hide false smiles as one dabbles with their quarry. They are, perhaps most significantly, used in almost every ceremony I have ever participated in during my time at the _Elitia._ On the first day, students had been required to step forward, take a razor sharp dagger, and cut lengthwise along their arms, to prove that they were strong enough to endure the training they had been chosen to take part in. The first time I had killed a man, my teachers had asked me to bring them back his blood in a goblet, to prove that I had the mettle to take the life of another. A goblet then strongly represents, to me, the life of an assassin, which would not always be weapons and strength, but cunning and wisdom as well.

Around me, the stone walls creak, and I glance, almost desperately, about, looking for the next and newest threat. Before I had entered the labyrinth I had been warned that each stage would have a time limit before a trap would set and my choice would be taken away. Assassins, my tutor had said simply, did not always have the luxury of time to deliberate over a complicated choice. Yet, if I chose impulsively and incorrectly, I would be killed. Only one could become the emperor’s assassin, after all, and the rest of the field had to be whittled away somehow.

My fingers traced along the rim of the goblet as I studied it. My heart told me that this was the correct choice, but my mind, which had been forged to herald the triumph of the empire through me every action, urged me to take the hammer. The walls creaked again and to my horror, a part of the floor near the door I had entered through fell away. I was taking too long, and already, it may be too late. Some other, lesser, student may have already solved the riddle and completed the trial. Some other student may be standing, triumphant now, before the emperor, waiting to bestowed with the honor we had all been fighting for since that first fateful day.

The walls creaked and more of the floor fell away, closer this time.

Goblet or hammer, heart or mind?

As the floor beneath my heels slid away, I leaped on the table, blindly snatching my fingers around the first things they touched, knowing, somewhere, that it was the right choice. It had to be. I was the alpha, the best, the girl destined to be the sword of the emperor.

“I’ve made my choice!” I scream, praying that someone will hear before it’s too late. “I’ve made my choice!”

For a moment, everything goes still, and then I scream as everything is cloaked in black.


	2. Chapter 2

# Part One: Beneath

The darkness still shrouds me when I open my eyes, thick and deep as the sea. I stick to my training, though: keep my breaths steady, like if I’m still sleeping, rely on all my other senses to figure out where I am. I don’t know how long it’ been since the labyrinth. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m still in the Labyrinth. This could be another room, another test. The air though, is damper here than it was before. Before it was arid, not hot, but still warm. The air here is cool as it brushes and nudges itself against my skin, and it feels like there’s more than just cold seeping into my bones…water? I can hear dripping off to my right and behind me, although the small echo makes it hard to tell how far, but it’s still the most likely source. Even without light, I can’t tell the room is huge; significantly bigger than the last room I was in. The room with the hammer and the cup. Did I fail? Is that why I’m down here? My mind flashes back to the floor falling in. Maybe I’m somehow beneath the labyrinth. Maybe that was the only way to go forward all along. I didn’t see any doors in the last room, after all. Maybe this is the next step.

“I can hear you breathing, you know.” The voice calls out from somewhere in the darkness. In front of me. Farther away than the water, but in front of me. I silence my breaths and slowly, slowly start to stand, trying my best to stay quiet.

“I know you’re there.” Closer now. Male. Not familiar, but that’s no surprise. In the _Elitia_ we were almost never allowed to speak to each other. Kappa—the girl who I suppose used to be my friend—only ever whispered to me after dark. Despite our differences in rank, we had bunks right next to each other and had since our first day. My mind flashes briefly back to our first trial, when we had been stuck in an arena together and ordered to kill the other. She had fought like hell, but I had bested her. I always bested her. And when she looked up at me, just before I took the killing blow, I could see in her eyes that she had always known how this was going to end. Known, and accepted it. I suppress a shudder and try to block out the memory. Kappa had to die. I didn’t have a choice.

“Where are you?” He calls again. Closer—he keeps creeping closer.

I close my eyes even though I know it’s pointless; I can’t see any more with them open than I can when they’re closed, but still. It centers me, helps me focus on the noises that surround me. The water dripping behind me. The scuttle of something in the shadows somewhere of to my right. The cool hiss of the breeze as it fills the room from the left. And his footsteps, for all that he’s trying to hide them, coming closer from in front of me and slightly to my left. And I’m calculating—calculating how long it takes for his foot to hit stone in between steps, calculating how loud the sound is, trying to figure out his weight, his agility, calculating how long his strides may be, and when all of this, logic and instinct combined point to an answer, I leap.

This is another test, it has to be. A test to see how well I can navigate when I’m blind. The boy—because he is a boy, from the sound of his voice he’s only seventeen, the same age as me—this boy may be innocent but he has to die because I will be the Emperor’s Assassin. I am the Alpha, the first, the best, and he is a boy, he is nothing, he is less than dust.

He grunts when I hit him and staggers a step. I aimed for his stomach, hoped for the kidneys, and from the sound of things, I hit them, but by the time he reacts, I’m already moving, already aiming up, hitting his solar plexus, his floating ribs, and then jabbing up with my knee to hit him in the throat and elbow him in the nose. I finish it off with a kick to his temple but as I go to swing, my heel connects with…empty air. My stomach almost drops out as I feel a hand wrap around my ankle and then I’m being thrown until I collide with a ground a few feet away.

I can hear him coming towards me—he’s not even trying to be quiet now that we’re fighting full on—but I stick to my training, stay quiet. The dark is just as much of a disadvantage for him as it is for me, if I’m smart, I can stay invisible for a few moments and turn that disadvantage to my advantage. If I’m going to be the Emperor’s assassin, and I am, I need to be smart. Being an assassin is about being clever, and I’m always the cleverest person in the room.

He’s running for me, but as he gets closer to where I landed, he slows down, as if he knows where I should be and is surprised to find that I’m not there. I take the moment of his hesitation to jump on his back, wrapping my arm around his trachea to cut off his breathing. I will pass this trial. I will. I’m the alpha. No one beats me; it’s not possible.

Still his fingers pull at my arm, trying desperately to get me to release. He reels back, but I’m holding on tight and I’m not planning on letting go any time soon. Not until he’s down. Not until I’m sure he’s dead. Not until I’ve passed this trial.

“Let. Go.” He rasps. He keeps trying to pull off my arm, beating it with his fists to get me to release, and my dead weight on his back isn’t doing wonders for his balance. “Please.”

“No.” I hiss. I don’t know why I do it. My mouth it right by his ear and in easy reach of one of his flailing arms. He could hit me easily if he wanted to, and while I’m stubborn enough to keep holding on, too many hits in the right place may make me loosen my grip enough for him to get free. For him to beat me.

“Please.” He says again. “Please, why are you doing this?”

I can feel his heartbeat getting slower. It won’t be long now. Won’t be long until he’s on the ground and I’m victorious. Kappa’s eyes flash in my head again. They were big hazel eyes, soft and friendly despite everything we had gone through, despite the wicked edge they hid. They always reminded me of a doe’s eyes I had seen once. And that’s how Kappa had died, like a doe, like an animal whose only purpose was to be slaughtered.

The boy in my arms roars and I wonder again if he’s _Elitia_ . He certainly has the build and training for it. If he is, I wonder which one he is. Over the years, ranks have gotten smaller and smaller. Only twenty of us took the trials. Twenty out of what had originally been close to three hundred. Three hundred children chosen from around the empire chosen to be part of the _Elitia_. I wonder if he’s the handsome golden-green eyes Beta who was always trying to get the girls alone, or the sulky and deadly Epsilon. He’s not tall enough to the reedy shaped Iota but not short enough to be the squaty centered Xi. Twenty of us took the trials. Fourteen boys, six girls. And ten of us died on the first day. It’s against all reason and good judgement, but I have to know.

“Who are you?” I growl. “Are you _Elitia?_ Who are you!?”

He shudders out a breath that might be relief, as if, just because he is _Elitia,_ I may spare his life. Idiot. If he was smart, he would know that it wouldn’t matter, that I have a chokehold grip on him and that he is going to die no matter what I say. If he was smart, he would never betray the _Elitia_ because the _Elitia_ is not supposed to exist. Thirteen years we’ve been training, and that has always been rule number one. The _Elitia_ doesn’t exist and nor do we. If he was smart, he’d die with honor and keep fighting.

“Sigma.” He gasps out. “I’m Sigma. Please. We’re—we’re on the same side. Please.”

Funny how a boy with so little air can have so many words. I don’t let go even as he passes out.

OOO

I think he’s as surprised as I am that I let him live when he comes to. We’re assassins. Being merciful is not who we are meant to be, and yet…

While he was out, I’d wandered. I’d counted my steps so I could always find my way back, but I’d wandered. The room was indeed cavernous. And wet. I’d lost track of how many puddles I’d stepped through after the count had hit sixty seven and by now my boots were thoroughly soaked, but at very least, I have an idea of the layout of the room. It was, as far as I could tell, somewhere around 250 feet wide. Bordered on one end by a giant pit (depth and length unknown) and on the other by a wall. In the other direction, one hand trailing along the wall that had broken briefly for a doorway I elected not to explore just yet, it was almost 86 steps, or 200 feet. Bordered by a wall again on one side and on the other, the last “puddle” I had stepped in. But it wasn’t a puddle. It was more like a raging river and it bordered the entire room along one side. I didn’t know what lay beyond it. I didn’t even know how wide it was. But it flowed into the pit and I didn’t fancy landing in there, so I had returned back to Sigma. Back to a Sigma that was slowly coming to.

He groans as he wakes up. I hear the rustle of his clothes and the skin on the stone as he makes to sit up, and, against all instinct, I don’t stop him. Curiosity begged to know what he would do and curiosity, in this case, has won. I keep quiet though, just in case he decided to fight back. I need to keep him blind, for now. If he really is _Elitia_ , I don’t have any reason to trust him. This could be another trial, another test. I need to maintain the upper hand.

“Are you still there?”

The sound of his feet swinging under him echoes through the room. He grunts as he stands, probably already bruising from the hits I landed on him.

“Girl? Person? Whoever you were? Where are we? Where are you?”

“Right here.”

My voice is soft, but I can almost sense his head whipping towards it, trying to figure out how far away I am. He takes a poorly concealed step towards me. I take a couple perfectly silent steps to the left.

“Where are we?” He asks again.

“You don’t know?” I ask. I pause only long so that he can’t follow my voice to see how I’m moving, where I’m moving to. A part of me sinks at the idea that we’re both caught unaware here. I had been half hoping that he would have some answers.

He laughs and the sound is bitter. “I’m literally in the dark here. Do you know how to get out?”

“Maybe.”

I’ve moved so that I’m on his left now, a little behind him. Keeping him off balance, making sure he doesn’t know exactly where I am.

“You going to tell me?”

I let him stumble about in the dark some more before I answer. Maybe he’ll think I abandoned him. Maybe he’ll think I’m a ghost. I don’t know, I don’t particularly care. Just so long as I maintain the upper hand.

“Should I?”

He fall’s quiet at that. Not looking for an answer, I think. Most people would reply with an enthusiastic ‘yes’ to that question without second thought, but Sigma pauses. He stops moving. Stops looking for me. Just folds himself into the darkness.

“Probably not.”

His voice is softer than I expected and curiosity wins out again. I take a few steps closer than reason dictates I should. “Why not?”

I can almost feel his head turn towards me, but he still doesn’t move.

“Because you’re _Elitia_. Because one of us is probably going to end up killing the other. Because this could be another trial. Because you’ve already let me live too long. Because you clearly don’t need my help.”

I’ve stopped moving too. Idiot.

“True.”

“Why’d you let me live?” He asks. “You didn’t have to. You almost had me.”

I blink at the directness, at the way he voices a question I’ve been asking myself since I let go of my chokehold grip. And maybe it’s his sincerity that makes me answer with honesty. Maybe it’s something else, but I tell him the truth.

“I don’t know.”

The barest rustle of cloth as he nods at this answer. Accepts it. Files it away for consideration later.

“Who are you? I know—I know you’re _Elitia_. No way you would know about them if you weren’t, but who are you? Which one of us?”

I open my mouth to answer, and stop just with the answer at the base of my throat. Alpha, I want to say. The first. The best. Your _superior_. But that gives away my upper hand. That gives away my strengths. That gives too much information about how I may be beaten or how to predict how I’ll move in a fight.

“Kappa.” I say instead. “I’m Kappa.”

“Huh.”

He doesn’t tag anything on, and I’m surprised. I can already tell that he’s a chatterbox. I wonder if he can sense the lie. I wonder if he knows that Kappa is dead by my hands. But he can’t; that’s impossible. There was no way for us to know who had died and who had survived.

“Well, Kappa,” he says at last. “What do you make of this predicament?”

He’s moving again, aimlessly, and I’m trying to decide if he already scoped out the area before I woke up here. If he knows as much as or more about this cavern than I do. I fall into step a few feet away from him but still heading in the same direction as he is. He’s heading towards the water. I don’t know whether I should stop him before he falls in or let him get swept away by the current, see where it leads him. I don’t answer his question though. I let him do the talking; he seems content enough to fill up the silence with empty words.

“Personally,” he continues, “I can’t decide if it’s another trial or if it’s a punishment, a punishment for failing the labyrinth.”

“I thought they killed us if we failed.” I object.

“Ahhh,” he says, “but what if they need us still? What if _no one_ makes it through?”

I open my mouth to respond, but close it just as quickly. To be honest, I never thought of that. I never questioned that I wouldn’t win the labyrinth, that I wouldn’t be the emperor’s assassin. I know that there are classes of the _Elitia_ behind us, but I never considered the role they would play either. I was always just focused on passing the trials, on reaching the goal. I flash back to the room with the goblet and the hammer. I was so confident. So confident. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe this lack of foresight is why I failed.

“Cat got your tongue, Kappa? Or are you not one for talking?”

“How did you fail?” I ask instead of answering. “What did you do wrong in the Labyrinth?”

I wish I could see him. I wish I could see if the weight that’s falling on me is the weight of his gaze as he struggles to find me in the darkness.

“There was a room,” he says, “A room where I had to run along thin boards to get to the other side. But there weren’t enough boards, so as I used them I had to go back and use old ones. And if I fell, well.”

“Abyss,” I say, thinking back to the floor falling away in my last room. How it swallowed everything for an eternity.”

He doesn’t say anything, but I can assume he’s nodding. Sigma, I get the feeling, is the kind of person who talks out loud to walk there way though a problem. He likes to have an audience, a sounding board. And, on that instinct, I’m starting to assign body language to him, because I don’t remember him from training at all. I keep trying to place his face and I can’t. Granted, barracks were four to a room and I know he was not among my bunkmates, but I should still remember. That’s what being an assassin means, noticing everything and everyone.

“Anyways,” he continues. “I was working fast, but clearly not fast enough. The room started shaking and supports fell away. Before I knew it, I had lost one board. I went to lunge for it, stupidly, I might add, and missed. I started falling but managed to cling to the board that was still standing. I was almost the door and was thinking that if I could swing myself up, maybe I could jump from supports without the board to get there, but…well, the supports I was on started shaking before I could get up, so I took a blind risk and jumped and missed. I fell until it went black and then I woke up here.”

“How long were you here before you ran into me?” I ask.

I hear a little rustle as he shrugs. “Maybe five minutes? And then I heard a little gasp of breath as you woke up and I knew I wasn’t alone down here. Can’t tell you how freaky that—”

He yelps as his foot connects with water and the stone scratches against his boots as he scrambles back. I can’t help but laugh.

“Did you know that was there?”

I grin, even though I know he can’t see it. “Maybe.”

I wish I could see the scowl I’m certain is gracing his face right now. “Bitch.” He mutters. “If you knew, you should have told me.”

Pebbles crunch beneath him as he steps forward and toes the water. “Do you know how wide it is?”

“Didn’t check. Wide enough.”

He scrambles for gravel to scoop up and a second later I hear him whip it out and across the water. Clever, I have to admit. I didn’t really care how wide the water was once I knew there was an exit on the side wall and no easy way to cross here. A few stones plop into the water, but some clatter on ground beyond the stream. Not a wall; more floor. Sigma’s voice is eerie.

“There’s more over there.”

“Well,” I snap, angry that he figured it out and I didn’t. “There’s no way to cross the water. I checked.”

I start stomping off towards the wall with the door, careful to keep along the side of the water so I’m sure to reach it.

“How deep do you think it is?” Sigma asks from behind me. “And how wide?”

“I don’t know!” I shout back. Gods above, I should have killed him when I had the chance. “And I don’t care. It’s not the way out.”

“But it could be!”

“It’s not,” I snap. My outstretched hand brushes against the wall and I grin a little. Just wait until he sees. “The door’s over here.”

“Door? You know—” he huffs a little as he jogs to figure out where I am. He grunts when he runs into the wall and I suppress a snicker. Even if he was clever before, he’s still an idiot. “You know,” he says again, an this time his hand’s out and reaching to  find what’s in front of him. It lands clumsily on my shoulder and I fight the instinct that has me wanting to turn around and use that arm as a means to throw him. Instead I shrug him off lightly.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Kappa, I don’t know where you’re going.”

“Follow my voice.”

“Kappa, if we’re going to work together, you have to actually, you know, work with me.”

“Don’t say that.”

“What?”

“Kappa. Don’t say it.”

“But it’s your name.”

“ _Don’t say it.”_

I can hear him pause behind me, trying to assess what set me off. I take a few steps before I stop too, the break in the wall where the door is marked by the empty air beneath my fingertips. I’ve never been afraid of the dark; in fact, over the years, I’ve come to revel it. Come to love how it cloaked my actions as I slipped around and learned the skills of my trade. A week ago, I would have marveled at the gift that this darkness is, how wonderfully and completely absent of light. It would be so easy to ditch Sigma. So easy to let him stumble around in the darkness until he either found the way himself or died, probably by falling into the pit I found earlier.

And yet…

“Sigma.” I snap. “Are you coming.”

He takes so long to reply that I wonder if he has died, or at least pulled some skill out of his arsenal and managed to mask his movements, but then his voice drifts out of the darkness behind me.

“Yeah,” he mutters. “Yeah, I’m coming.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aight so chapters are going to be a rough estimate here. And you meet Sigma, the assassin who is an actual puppy. 
> 
> ~~also I lost the two note cards that had all of my notes on them and I'm currently in a small state of panic but its nbd, right? _Right??_~~
> 
> Also, thoughts on making this section called "The Black Labyrinth" instead?


	3. Chapter 3

The hallway stretches on forever. And it twists a lot. I make Sigma trail along one side with his fingers to see if there’s a break in the wall, a suggestion of another room or corridor, but time goes by and there’s nothing except twists and turns and stairs that lead up for a down bit and then up for ages. A part of me wonders if the pit wasn’t just a pit, but another room deep below us. I wonder, if I had looked hard enough or if I had been able to see, if I would have found stairs descending into it. 

Sigma, mercifully, stays silent. I’ve lived so much of my life in silence or hushed whispers that the endless stream of words that I know he’d burst under normally would be enough to set my teeth on edge. It’s good he doesn’t talk; I think I’d kill him if he did, just for a little bit of peace. 

Time slides by. I count the seconds with my steps. An hour passes. Two. We walk seven and a half miles. I contemplate killing Sigma just for something to do, but this darkness feels hungry and alive and something about the gentle puffs of Sigma’s breaths and the quiet cadence of his life makes me feel armed against it. Something about it is as comforting as the familiar shape and weight of a favorite dagger in my palm. I miss my weapons. I miss knowing where we’re going.

“Sigma,” I ask. I keep my voice light. It’s just a way to pass the time. Just something to keep my occupied other than this hallway that leads nowhere. 

“Hmmm.” 

He’s not paying attention to me, not really. I can hear it in the ay he hums out his answer. I open my mouth to say more, to continue the conversation, but there’s nothing. I can’t ask him who he killed for the trials because then he may ask me who I killed and I don’t have a good enough lie to answer that. I don’t even know who all survived the first day. I don’t even know who went through the labyrinth. I didn’t care. I was planning on winning so I never stopped to consider what would happen if I lost. 

I push that thought away roughly. This could just be another trial. This could just be another test I have to survive to prove myself. I can’t lose. I  _ don’t  _ lose. 

“Nothing.”

“Okay.”

We’re both quiet for a few minutes; the only sound is our hands as they trail against the wall, looking for a way out. 

“Do you think we should turn back?”

His voice cuts through the darkness and I turn my head, trying to see him through the impossible darkness. 

“Why?”

“Because we’re not finding anything. We could go back, try and cross the river…”

He trails off and I don’t say anything, even though it’s a thought I’ve considered myself these last few hours. But as if the sound of his voice is a spell, I suddenly think about the yawning darkness behind us and against all reason, I feel as though the hallway has shifted somehow; changed the moment that we walked past. Even though I’m shrouded in darkness, I feel watched. A shudder creeps its way up my spine. 

“No,” I say slowly. “No, lets keep going.”

It’s quiet and I can imagine him looking back at where we came from, seeing only darkness, the same thought that just hit me hitting him. I imagine how he’ll swallow down his unease. I imagine how he’ll fix himself forward with a promise to never look back. 

“Good idea.” He rasps. 

We walk a few more steps in silence. 

“Kappa?”

“What?”

“Hold out your arm to the side. Across the hallway.”

“Why?”

“Just, please do it, okay?”

I sigh, but do as he asks. I nearly jump out of my skin when my fingers brush skin. 

“Calm down, it’s just me. I’m trying to measure the hallway.”

“Of course you are.” I grumble, but I reach my hand back out. Our fingers brush against each other. 

“How big is your wingspan?”

“My  _ what?” _

“Your wingspan—the length from the end of one arm to the other.”

“I don’t know.” I admit. Honestly, I never thought about it. My arms are the length they are; I’ve only ever trained around that, never considered the use of that knowledge. I can eyeball an estimate of what I can and can’t reach and spaces where I can and can’t fit. Exact measurements never meant much to me unless I was pacing out a room or determining how long a path was. 

Sigma looses a frustrated breath. “How tall are you?”

I hesitate. If I tell Sigma how tall I am, he can figure out his proportions to measure the hallway. He can also figure out based on that information my reach and my stride. He can figure out how to hold me off if it ever comes down to a fight, and if this is some sort of trial, then Sigma was right earlier. This only ends with one of us killing the other. I can’t let him have any edge on me. I checked his height while he was passed out (He’s about six foot even; he has four inches on me) but right now, to him, I’m an unknown entity. He knows that I can whoop his ass, but he doesn’t know much besides that. 

“Why do you need to measure the hallway?”

“Why not? Gives me a sense of my environment.”

“And why would you need to know that?”

“In case I have to fight.”

I stiffen and drop my arm. A fight. He’s expecting a fight. I don’t know why I’m surprised. I am, after all, planning on killing him at some point. He almost definitely knows this. And yet, I had hoped…

I don’t know what I had hoped. 

“Kap—wait no, I’m not planning on fighting  _ you. _ ”

“Right.”

He sighs loudly. I add ‘dramatic’ to the growing list of adjectives I’ve been compiling since we met. You’d think someone who had trained to be an assassin would be more stoic. I am. Others were. What’s Sigma’s problem?

“Kappa, let me explain.”

He’s stopped again. I can’t hear his footsteps anymore. Regardless, I charge on. I don’t want to be around him if he’s planning on killing me. He’s too aware of where I am. I need to regain my advantage. I should have just killed him when I had the chance. That’s probably what I was supposed to do. 

“I told you not to call me that.” I snap back over my shoulder. 

I don’t know whether I’m happy or disappointed that the sound of his feet doesn’t come rushing after me. 

“Ambush.” He says. 

I stop. 

“What?”

“I was planning for if there was an ambush. How much room we would have to fight. How many people could stand shoulder to shoulder across the hall if they needed to stop us. I was planning on fighting if there was an ambush.”

Despite myself, I turn back towards him. “You honestly expect me to believe that?”

“I don’t want to kill you, Kappa.” He whispers, but his voice travels down the hall to me, ricocheting off the stone walls. 

“Don’t,” I say. 

He lets out a long, frustrated breath. “If you don’t want me to call you Kappa, then what should I say? Hey, you?”

It’s not what I meant, but I let it slide. Better not get too tangled up in emotions. I trail slowly back to him. 

“Nothing. Don’t call me anything. There’s no one else to talk to down here but us. I already know you’re talking to me.”

“Fine.”

I stop once I get back. I counted my steps as I walked away and I count them again as I walk back. I’m standing maybe three feet in front of him. 

“And I’m five eight.”

“So assuming that you’re wingspan is the same as or close to your height, then plus mine makes the hallway about…eleven and a half feet wide?”

“Six people across, shoulder to shoulder, with…” I pause as I do the math. “about four inches between them.”

“Clever girl.”

“Yes, well.”

“Climb on my shoulders.”

_ “What?” _

“I want to see how tall it is.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Oh, sure.” Clothing rustles and his boots rub against the stone as he crouches down. “Ka—you, where are you? Come here.”

I stretch my hands out low as I step forward, looking to feel where he is. My fingers brush against his nose, his closed eyes, the soft silk of his hair.

“Are you going to climb on my shoulders or map my face?”

I smack him lightly on the cheek, but then I brace my hands on his head and drag one foot up to step on his shoulder before I hesitate. 

“And you promise you won’t drop me?” I ask. 

“On my honor.”

I snort. “Because that’s worth much.”

“I dare say it is, actually.” His words sting with offence. 

“You’re a trained assassin.”

“You say that like if it means something down here. Like if the fact that I can kill people makes a difference.”

“I dare say it does, actually,” I parrot. 

He slaps my calf lightly. 

“I swear on my life that I will not drop you, and if I do, well, then you can kill me.”

I pause a moment, considering, and then I lift my other foot to his shoulder. 

He rises slowly, and I’m still crouching, hands braced against his head. I’ve been trained over the years to have perfect balance, to scale walls and mountains that scrape against the sky. Hell, just yesterday (if I can even still have a proper handle on time down here. If it’s still the same day as the labyrinth) I stood on top of a high platform that shifted whenever I did and threatened to spill me over the edge. Sigma’s grip on my calves is tight and I can feel when I can brace myself against his arms. I have nothing to worry about. 

And yet, as he tells me that he’s standing again and that it’s my turn to rise, my stomach drops out. 

And yet, as I reach my hands towards the ceiling, I can imagine how my skull would crack against the stone if I fell. 

And yet, as I stretch my fingers up and up and touch nothing I imagine that it’s nothing below us and that we’re falling. 

Sigma must feel my weight shift or sense in some other way my nervousness because he squeezes my calves reassuringly. 

“Okay up there?”

I can’t breathe. My heart is racing like a million horses. I’m going to fall. 

“Kappa?”

My breath hitches. I’ve trained myself against this. It’s nothing; it’s  _ nothing _ . 

“Nothing here.” I say. I wonder if he can feel the strain in my voice. My knees are jelly, but I’ve got my heartbeat back under control. 

He shifts and lets go and then I am falling and I’m going to fall forever and my mouth is open to scream—

He catches me.

“Better now?”

I nod numbly before I realize that he can’t see me in the dark. 

“Better.” I choke. 

He sets my feet gently down on the ground, holding my shoulder out to steady me. I almost want to collapse with relief at the feel of solid ground underneath my boot soles, but I settle for a deep breath. I step away and reach a hand out to brush the wall. Forward. We have to keep going forward. 

“You’re afraid of heights.”

Sigma’s voice cuts through the darkness with the same deadly precision as a knife. I bristle. 

“Am not.”

“Yes, you are.” He said slowly. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” I snap back. “It was a stupid idea anyways. Let’s keep going.”

I can feel his assessing silence pushing down around me, probing for a weakness. 

“Okay.” He says at last. “Onward.”

OOO 

We don’t talk. I tell him whenever an hour has gone by, more as a way to pass time than anything. We were trained together. He knows how to mark time. He knows how to match his strides to seconds. He doesn’t say anything more about measuring the hallway or how I reacted to being lifted into the darkness. I don’t try to find anything else about him. I’ve decided that as soon as I’ve passed through the darkness and am on navigable land again, I’m going to kill him. It’d be easy; he’s too trusting. 

We’ve walked twenty two miles when we reach the stairs. I expect them to be like the others; brief, a flight, maybe two, then straight for a while before dipping back down farther than we went up, but these go on forever. With my steps I count one flight. Then another and another and another before we’re heaving. There’s a sharp right turn after the third flight and another one after the fourth. We stop on the landing for the fifth, taking a minute to rest. My feet have begun to ache. And I’m hungry. How long has it been since I ate? My stomach falls out again, just as quickly as it had when I had wobbled on Sigma’s shoulders earlier. 

“Sigma?” I ask. 

He groans. “What?”

“What do we do about food?”

I can feel him still. Hear the moment when his breath catches as the same realization hits him that hit me two seconds ago.”

“Please.” He says. “Please do not kill and eat me.”

I reach out blindly and punch him. He shouts as my hand hits something soft and then groans. I smirk, pleased to have connected with something. I’m getting better at accounting for the slight echo and figuring out where he is. 

“Oh gods,” He mutters. 

I frown. I hope that wasn’t his throat. I hope that I didn’t hit him harder than I thought. I hope that I won’t have to deal with a dead Sigma. 

“Are you okay?”

“Yep.” His voice sounds a little strained still, but it’s cheery, so I shrug it off. “Yep, I’m fine.” 

“We need to figure out what to eat.”

I hear him settle down near to me, but far enough that I can’t reach to hit him again so easily.

“We can live at least twenty one days without food.”

Unbidden, my mind flashes back to a time before the  _ Elitia _ in a land with dry soil that could only grow weeds and wildflowers. The memory of hunger sinks itself into my skin. 

“I know.” I say roughly. “But what about water?”

Sigma curses in the darkness. “Idiots.” He mutters. 

“Who?”

“Us. The river, before, we should have—”

“We didn’t even know if it was safe. Besides, how would we have carried it? In a boot? No thank you. We’ll have to make do.”

“That’s three days.” He says quietly. “You can only live three days without water. We’ve been here for what? At least six hours, maybe more?”

He curses again and I lean my head back against the stone wall. 

“We’re going to die down here.” He mutters. 

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, focus.

“No,” I say, when I’ve centered myself again. “We’re not. We’re going to climb these steps until we reach the top. We’re going to keep looking for a way out. We’re going to survive.”

“Little miss good soldier.” He grumbles. 

“That’s little miss good  _ assassin _ ,” I correct. I need him to keep his good humor. I need him to keep thinking. He gives up, he dies. And I find that I really don’t want Sigma to die. If not least because I don’t want to be left alone with his corpse here in the darkness. I stand. Sigma will die when I decide to kill him. No sooner, no later.

“Did you just make a joke?”

I mount one step. “Come on,” I call back, mounting the next. “We have a few more stairs to go yet.”

I listen for a groan as he clambers after me.

“You made a joke.” He proclaims. He makes it sound like I flew, or grew and extra set of limbs, or performed some other impossible miracle.

I huff out another breath. We reach another landing. It turns right again. 

“So?”

“I didn’t think you could.”

“Oh, ha ha.” I snap. 

“There we go,” he said, a chuckle ghosting his words. “There’s the girl I know and love.”

“Shut up.”

“If it bothers you?” He asks. “Never.”

“I’m going to hit you again.”

I listen as he skitters away again. 

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you it’s dangerous to fight someone in the dark on a flight of stairs?” He fusses. 

“Yes, actually.” I smile sweetly in his direction, even if he can’t see it. Maybe it will color my words. “All the better to kill someone.”

“Touché.” 

I chuckle, but keep climbing. Another flight comes and goes. That’s seven. After the eighth, we reach solid ground again, but encounter a new problem. The hallways splits into two opposite directions. 


	4. Chapter 4

“Well.” Sigma says dryly. “This is a conundrum.” 

We’ve been standing at the T junction for ten minutes trying to decide which way to go. Forward is no longer an option. It’s purely left, right or back and in the impenetrable darkness. It’s hard sometimes to tell the difference between the three. Sigma’s sitting on the steps, listening to me pace. He asked me after a couple of minutes to stop being “a super sneaky assassin girl” and “to let him hear me so he would know if I tried to push him down the steps.”

I had nudged him lightly for that. Not enough to push him, but enough to make him tense and snatch for my ankle to drag me down with him. I’d been sure to keep my distance, and make noise, after that. 

I force a breath out between my teeth. I always hated riddles and this feels like a riddle. My ribs squeeze like they did as I hesitated on my decision back in that last room in the Labyrinth. I need to make a decision. And I need it to be the right one. 

“Right.” I say. “We should go right.”

“I vote left.”

“Are you  _ trying  _ to be difficult?”

“No, I just—” I picture him raising a shoulder, dropping it. “I just feel gut instinct telling me to go left. I feel better about it.”

“And I feel the same way about right.”

“Then we’re at a stalemate.”

“Why do you want to go left?”

“I don’t know. The air feels wetter. I grew up by the sea—I  _ trust _ wet air.”

“That’s weird and irrational.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No, what I mean is, it’s irrational because the last place we were that had damp air was that first chamber. We could just end up right back where we started.”

“But we need water.” He counters. 

“We need a way out.” I say. “Water does no good if we’re stuck down here forever.”

“A way out is meaningless if we’re dead by the time we get there.”

I glare in his direction. I imagine that he glares back. An impasse indeed. 

I sigh. “We have three days.”

“At most, yes.”

“We’ve been here about six and half hours or so. Maybe a little more.”

“Again, yes.”

“So we have at most sixty five hours before we die of dehydration.”

“Optimistically, yes.”

“And after so long of sleep deprivation, you start to hallucinate.”

“I’d really like to not hallucinate in this dark hallway.”

There’s an edge to his voice, but I keep going. 

“And no matter which way we choose, we have to go back the same amount of time we came, at least and then some if we ever change our minds.”

“Where are you going with this.”

I stop and squat down next to him, drawing out a diagram I can’t see on the stones in the dark. “We rest here for five hours, sleep in two and a half hour shifts. If anything comes down one path, then we go down the other. If something comes up the stairs, the person awake gets to choose the direction.”

“Okay.”

His voice is skeptical, but he’s listening. I want to sag with relief, but I push on. “Then we go right.”

He shouts an objection, but I talk louder. 

“The we go right for twenty hours. If we find nothing in that time, then we turn around and head back so we can go left.”

I rock back as I wait for him to consider this. 

“We go right for sixteen hours.”

“No, I said—”

“We need to rest at some point. We go sixteen hours. We rest four. Two hour sleeping shifts again. We come back sixteen hours. We rest four. We go left for twenty, but from the feel of the air, water isn’t that far away.”

“So, what, we get to spend more time going your way?”

“It’s  _ your _ plan. We’re going  _ your _ way first. I’m compromising. This is a compromise.”

“I don’t have to listen.”

“I could leave.”

I will my breathing to keep even. “So?”

“So I’m guessing that you let me live because you don’t want to be alone down here as much as I don’t.”

“So why would you leave?”

“Because I’d rather be live alone than die with company.”

I rub my finger along the edge of the step. It’s what I’d do to and he knows it. And alliance is only good for so much, after all. When it stops serving you, best to get out while you still can.

“Fine. Agreed. Sure.” I say. 

He reaches out a hand that bumps my shoulder. “Shake on it?”

I grab his hand roughly and shake.

“And after sixteen hours if we don’t find anything, we stop, rest and turn around, no matter what?”

“No matter what.” I say grimly. 

I can practically feel him smile. 

“Good. Now get some sleep.”

I hesitate and he must feel it because he adds. 

“I already promised that I won’t kill you and I swear that I won’t try any other tricks while you’re out either. I won’t even tie your fingers together.”

I peer into the darkness, as if suddenly I’ll be able to see the look on his face and discern the truth from what I see. I peer even though I’ve been looking all day and I know I can’t even see my hand when I hold it against my nose, and then I give in. 

“Fine, but if you invent an emergency and take us right for no reason, then I  _ will  _ kill you.”

He chuckles. 

“Good night, assassin girl.”

I stand and step away from the stair so I can curl against the wall and keep my back protected. I don’t bother to reply.

OOO

I’m standing in the Master’s temple. 

The light’s as low as always, but I can still see their hooded faces around me, covering their eyes and most of their nose, revealing only the hard lines of their mouths. It’s no different than ever before, but to me, they look disappointed. Disappointed in my failure. I was supposed to be the Alpha. The first. The Best. Now I’m nothing but a girl who couldn’t solve a simple riddle. I should be dead for the dishonor. They should kill me, cut me down where I stand. I bow, dropping my knees and shoulders to the ground. Submission. I will submit to their ruling. 

“Alpha.” They echo. 

“You have failed us.”

“Dishonored us.”

“Laid to ruin our plans.”

Their voice bounces around the room, a beast with many mouths. I close my eyes as they pause for a breath. Please let my death be swift. 

“What would you have us do, Alpha?” They intone. 

“We clothed you.”

“Fed you.”

“Taught you to fight.”

“Taught you to  _ survive _ .”

Their voices come together as one. 

“And you betrayed us, Alpha.”

“Please,” I whimper. “Please, I’ll do anything.”

“Anything?” They say together. 

“That’s a big promise” says one mouth. 

“You should be sure you can keep it.” Says another. 

“I will,” I say, lifting my head, trying to beseech them. “I’ll do it. I’ll do anything. Please.”

The silence grows, expands, stretches until it’s no more than the width of a hair.

“The empire has failed us.” They say at last. “You will destroy it.”

“Escape Sicarii Palatio.”

“Find the emperor.”

“Gain his favor.”

“Then kill him in our name.”

“Do this and we will spare you.” They chant. “Fail,”

“And we will not be merciful again.”

The lone voice calls out that last condition and I rise. 

“Do you accept?” They ask. Their voices echo around me. 

“I do.”

The Master in front of me smiles wryly. 

“Then it’s time you wake up.” It says, and I’m reminded that the Masters are not people. They are beings. They are forces of nature beyond human control. And I’ve just made a deal with them. 

“And get to work.” The crow together. 

OOO

Sigma’s shaking me awake, close enough that I can feel his warm breath on my cheek. 

“Kappa!” He shouts in my ear. 

I smack his hand away as I sit up. “Don’t call me that.”

“So you’ve said.” He says dryly. 

I glance over at the direction of his voice. He’s leaned back to give me some space. 

“Sleep well?” he asks.

I think about my dream of the Masters. The deal I made with them. I can’t help but shudder and I’m glad that Sigma can’t see the movement in the dark. “Perfectly.” I mutter. 

He’s quiet and I for a moment I wonder if he’s gone to sleep. 

“Wake me when you’re shift is over.” He says instead. “Don’t leave alone.”

I open my mouth to say that I will, but then I hear his breathing shift and deepen and I know he’s already asleep.

We were trained to be able to do this. To sleep immediately anywhere and then be able to function after just a few moments rest. 

We were tested when we first came to the  _ Elitia _ to see how long we could survive without sleeping. To see how it would affect us after so long. After five days and twenty two and a half hours, I collapsed. I had been the last one to fall; another perfect mark that led to my status as the alpha and my favor with the masters. 

They trained us to see how little sleep we could get by on and still survive.

I won that contest too. 

Until the labyrinth, I had never failed my masters, never given them a reason to doubt me. Until now. It may have been a dream, but an itching part of my heart told me it was more than that. I had seen the masters do amazing deeds over the years of my training. They had never seemed to be governed by whatever laws of nature plagued the rest of us. They had so often known things that were, by all reason, impossible for them to know. Who was to say that the dream couldn’t have been a vision. It sure had felt real.  

I settle down where Sigma was sitting on the top of the stairs, curled so my head rests against my knees. I count the seconds. I strain my ears trying to hear anything beyond the sound of Sigma’s deep breaths and my own heartbeat. Nothing. Not even a tremor. 

Maybe we’re dead. Maybe this is some kind of hell and we died in the labyrinth and now we’ve been sent here as punishment for being exactly what we were raised to be. It doesn’t seem entirely fair, but then, life never is. 

A minute slips by. 

In my mind’s eye I see a moldy heel of bread fly over the heads of starving children. It’s not a familiar memory anymore. After a while, I stopped looking back and only ever bothered on focusing forward. But as I unpack this, as I watch the first seconds unfold, it has the comfortable feel of an old piece of clothing that was once worn and fretted over often. I know what memory this is. I know the rules the masters gave the children of my village that day.

The child who caught the bread and brought it to the Masters, standing still and clean in their heavy cloaks in a circle around the pen despite the dust and heat, would win a very special prize. The moment they saw the bread though, the other children forget the prize. What’s a toy or some trinket from these strangers when you have a starving belly? Never mind the mold, their bellies were aching, pushed out so they looked pudgy they’re so robbed of food. Why would you bring a crumb to these people who are obviously so well cared for? They didn’t need it; you’re the one that’s going to starve.  And as the sun beat down on their scrawny backs, all the gathered children scrambled for the heel before it even reached the ground. 

All except for one. A clever little girl who had lived with being hungry longer than the rest. The bread was nothing to me; the bread would stem my hunger for a day, maybe two if I was lucky, and then it would be like if I had never swallowed it down. I knew that. No, the bread didn’t matter. I wanted the prize because I knew a prize from people like this could feed me for a year. 

All the masters look alike. Place them side by side and it’s like if it’s eight versions of the same person. But that day, that first fateful day when I scrambled and surged and fought for that heel through all the bigger stronger kids, when I had brought it almost reverently to the masters, one of them had smiled cynically at me, and from then on, that was  _ my  _ master. I could always tell them apart, pick them individually out from a crowd. I didn’t have names for them; there was no way  _ to _ name them. But I could pick one out from the other. I knew which had said this thing or done that thing. I always knew which one had been the one had smiled at me. I always had the strangest sense that that one was rooting for me above all the others. 

I had failed them, the masters had said. 

Failed them as the empire had. 

And I had ruined their plans to correct that wrong. 

I had always known that I was to be a weapon, and because I was a weapon, I never questioned what I was told to do. I killed. I solved complex problems. I survived to become the best weapon that the masters of the  _ Elitia _ had in their arsenal. And for being the best, for being favored, I had loved the masters. I had wanted to prove to myself that I was worthy of their faith. That I was worthy of the smile my master had given to me when I had presented them the bread like if it was a handful of jewels and not the moldy lump it was. 

I still wanted to prove myself to them. 

Because the masters were otherworldly and powerful and I wanted…

I didn’t know what I wanted. I had only ever wanted what the masters had wanted. And this is what they wanted, so I would amend my wrongs at whatever cost. The masters had asked me to, so I would.  _ My _ master had smiled at me once again as those last words had been echoed. 

And that smile was a reminder…and a challenge. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the Masters are creepy af.


	5. Chapter 5

After two and a half hours, I find Sigma’s ribs then deliver a swift kick to them to wake him up. Harsh, I suppose, considering he was a little gentler with me, but effective. And it reminds him who has the upper hand here. He groans, but I’m already finding the wall for the right side of the corridor. 

“You have two options.” I call back at him. I can hear him standing, bracing himself against the wall, a rustle of cloth as he rubs his aching ribs. 

“Left or right?” he asks. 

Stones hiss as he moves forward and traces his fingers along them. I scowl, even though he can’t see it. The time that I had spent alone had been…disturbing. The darkness was too eerie, too complete. I wanted to find a way out, sooner rather than later. I didn’t have time for games. 

“Walk for eight hours, rest two,” I say, forcing lightness into my voice, “Or walk sixteen and rest four.”

Sigma hesitates and I know that he’s thinking, as I did in the darkness as he slept that eight hours would be easier on our bodies, even if it’s less time to sleep straight. Sleep is nothing; we know how to manage. 

But stopping in this darkness is disturbing. The entire time I kept watch, I had the disconcerting feeling that someone or something was watching me. I had been torn between abandoning Sigma to walk down the hallway a little just for something to do and staying with him, just so I wouldn’t be alone lest whatever was out there decided to pounce. 

“Eight hours.” He says, and I’m surprised. I would have chosen sixteen, but the truth of his next words undoes me. 

“I can’t spend another two straight hours alone in here.”

I swallow before I reach out my arm in the darkness towards him. “Fair enough. Where are you? I don’t want to start without you.”

His fingertips brush mine. “Here.”

“Alright, let’s go.”

We trail along. The darkness never yields to light, but the passage gets cooler. I ask Sigma how he slept, just to break up the silence. 

“Fine.” Comes his response, drifting to me through the dark. 

His voice doesn’t have an edge to it, but it’s different, somehow. Like if something changed while we rested. I wonder for a moment if he had a dream of the masters as well, but I dismiss it quickly. Sigma is nobody. The masters never expected him to amount to anything. Not like me. Not like their champion who dishonored and failed them. 

Our fingers hiss as they slide along the stones. 

“Earlier,” I say, “earlier you said that you used to live by the sea.”

I hope he doesn’t think I’m prying. I hope he answers. I hope he knows that I’m only asking because the silence is driving me mad and I can’t keep on only counting my steps with the seconds because I’m really starting to hate the endless stream of numbers. We’ve walked three miles down the right hallway. So far, nothing. And while I know that we still have close to another fourteen hours down this path, it’s driving me crazy. Sigma’s silence has almost taken on a judgmental weight; as if he knows that this is the wrong path but it too polite to object because we agreed. 

I wonder who they made Sigma kill, that first day. I wonder who they made him kill to prove that he was loyal only to the emperor.  I wonder who that person was to him. I wonder how he did it and whether or not he cried or begged forgiveness. I certainly didn’t, but after all this time I know that Sigma is different. I wonder if he regrets it. As the silence stretches on, I open my mouth to ask him and the words are on the tip of my tongue, but he answers before they can take shape and fly away from the safety of my mind. 

“I did.”

His voice is cold. A killer’s voice. It’s easy to forget, sometimes in the darkness, that he’s done practically everything I’ve done. Killed just as many people to get to this point. And yet, up until now, I never would have guessed. 

I squint my eyes to peer into his corner of the darkness. What did those long empty hours when I slept do to him?

“What was it like?”

He’s quiet for a long time again. “Different. Nice.”

“I’ve never really seen it,” I admit. “The sea.”

“Well, there’s not much to see.” 

“Not much to see in the sea?” I jest. I grin broadly over at where I can hear him walking, but he doesn’t laugh, not even so much as a chuckle. I resist the urge to sigh. Before, we threw comments and thoughts at each other quietly and infrequently, but Sigma seems determined to put that to an end, and it’s driving me mad that I don’t know why. Did something happen that he’s not telling me about? The question rises in my throat, but I clamp it down before the words can take shape. If he thinks I’m nervous, that gives him the upper hand, and I need to keep my control over this situation. 

“What about you?” 

I nearly jump as his question emerges from the darkness next to me. 

“Where are you from?” He asks. 

I think back on dusty fields and arid heat and bellies that were never quite full. 

“Nowhere important,” I say, swallowing my bitterness. “I don’t even know what it was called.”

“What was it like?”

Before I can stop myself, my lips are putting shape to the truth. 

“Like Hell.” I say, and this time I can’t help the bitterness. “Like a place that the gods had abandoned.”

He’s quiet for a long time after that, but this time I think it’s more because I’ve stunned him than anything else and a part of me is happy that I shut him up. I don’t know how it took me this long to remember that the only past either of us have is a life of training to be the most adroit assassin in the empire—a task we both failed—and a childhood we were directed to bury our first day with the  _ Elitia _ . The past doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is my deal with the Masters. Escape this place, the Sicarii Palatio as the Masters called it, find the emperor, kill him. 

We walk another three and a half miles. Sigma doesn’t talk, but he hums. It’s a little unnerving in the darkness and I’m tempted to kill him to make it stop, but I know the silence is worse. Besides, I’m only half listening as my mind’s reeling through how I can best carry out the Master’s orders. They’re straightforward enough, but still a challenge. I’ve never even heard of the Sicarii Palatio, so even though I may find myself as a new resident, I’m still blind down here, literally wandering around in the dark. I don’t know anything about the security measures or the prison’s layout—because I’ve finally decided that that’s what this is, a prison—or even who the inmates might be. It’s maddening, but I suppose I should have expected it. Regaining the Masters’ favor after it’s been lost is has always been nearly impossible. 

The emperor portion isn’t going to be easy either. Finding out his location will mean bribing officials with money I don’t have to figure out where he’ll be and when, and then it’s a matter of not only traveling there, but then getting close enough to land a killing blow. There’ll be countless guards standing between us and while I’m skilled enough to be able to handle that, I’d rather minimize my risk of this job ending with me dead. 

Impossible, but so are a lot of jobs I’ve done over the years. If I put my mind to it, I’ll achieve it, simple as that. I just need a plan first. It’s always so much easier to act when I’ve got a list in my mind of every step I’m going to do and what I need to get to pull it off.

I barely notice as we tick off another hour and then another one. Sigma hums the entire time, but by now it’s become a sweet sort of background noise. It certainly makes the darkness seem less imposing. I’ve been trying to map out a mental visual of the path we’ve taken so far, but I’m sure that I have some of it wrong. The darkness is making me second guess myself. Like if somehow, because I didn’t actually see where I was going, it didn’t really happen. I’m half tempted to ask Sigma if he remembers anything, but I decide against it. I need to do this alone. If not only to prove that I can to the masters, but also to prove it myself. More than the darkness, more than anything, the most frustrating part of this entire experience is that  _ I  _ failed. Me. Since going to the  _ Elitia _ , I’ve always been the fastest learner, the most deadly of us all, the cleverest at solving problems. I was  _ the Alpha.  _ And now that doesn’t even matter, because I messed it all up in the most crucial moment. How can I be sure of myself anymore? How can I be sure that, even if I do everything the Masters have asked, I won’t fail again? How can I be sure that I even deserve my name?

A tremor snakes its way through the floor and up the walls. I hear Sigma crash to the ground with the unexpected shift, and I’m jarred away from the wall, but my balance is good so I keep my footing. 

“What the hell was that?” Sigma yelps. 

I can hear the waver in his voice; it echoes the disquiet sweeping through me. We’re alone in a pitch black hallway that just shuddered with tremendous force for no clear reason. There could be someone or something out there that caused it and is now uncomfortably close to us. Somewhere above us, the ceiling may be cracked enough to cave at any moment. The walls could collapse and leave us buried in rubble. I immediately raise my guard, silencing my breaths so I can hear better, tilting my head back and forth trying to get a sense of where that came from, and from how far away. 

“Kappa?” he asks. There’s an edged uncertainty in his voice. 

“Quiet,” I hiss. 

He breaths a sigh of relief, as if for a moment, he was worried that I had left him behind, but stays still and does his best to minimize his noise.

It’s no good. The hallways has fallen back into that same eerie silence. 

“Nothing,” I admit after a minute, finally conceding defeat. “I can’t hear anything here besides us.

He sighs, as disappointed as I am. I listen to him stand and brush off his clothes and then as he walks over to stand be. I stiffen for a moment, but then remind myself that Sigma hasn’t hurt men yet, he’s probably not going to, and I can beat him in a fight. Besides, I can’t give him a reason to think that he can’t trust me. Mutual distrust will must make it harder to kill him later. He stops when he’s close to me and together, we peer through the darkness down the stretch of hallway we came from. There’s still nothing to see, but the act is such a force of habit that we can’t help ourselves.

“Well,” Sigma says. He’s close enough that I can hear it when he swallows. I edge away a few inches. “Kinda glad we didn’t go left now.”

I can’t help but chuckle and I know,  _ I know _ , he smiles over at where he imagines I’m standing. I hear him stumble, but then he reached out and lightly bumps my neck. 

“Good job, girl.”

I chuckle and I can’t deny that my chest glows a little with pride. Maybe I’m not so much of a failure after all. 

“That was my neck,” I say once I’ve managed to kill the chuckle. I’m still grinning though and I’m grateful that he can’t see that in the darkness. It’d ruin the persona I’ve been cultivating. 

“What?”

“My neck. When you bumped me, you hit my neck.” 

I can feel him assessing me in the darkness, but then I hear a rustle of fabric as he shrugs. “I was going to bump you with my shoulder, but you moved. Sorry.” 

I shrug too, even if he can’t see it. “It’s alright. So long as that wasn’t what you were aiming for.”

He laughs and I can tell it’s real, deep and full and rich with joy. I hate to admit it, but my smile gets a little broader. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve been able to hear someone laugh like that and it’s a nice sound. It suits the boy I see him to be in my mind. 

“I promise that’s not what I was aiming for.”

“Good.” 

“Out of curiosity, if I had been aiming for your neck?”

“I’d say that that’s a weak ass punch and then I’d whoop your sorry little ass for the offence.”

He chuckles and I wish I could coax that full laugh again, just to revel in the sound. 

“Good to know.”

I reach out and bump him with my knuckles. They connect with soft fabric pulled over sturdy muscle and I pull back quickly, silently cursing the blush that rises to my cheeks, thankful once again that he can’t see my face.

“Come on,” I say. “We have a ways to go yet before we can stop.”

I sense him nod and then gravel grits as he turns around. “Yeah,” he says after a second. “Yeah, let’s go.”

I reach out my arm to fumble in the dark for the wall of the hallway and then Sigma yelps.

“Fuck!” He shouts.

I rush over to where I can hear him rasping, ready to fight even though I can’t hear an attacker. 

“What is it? What happened?” 

I’m stretching out a hand to find him and see where he’s hurt without even thinking about it. My fingers brush against his adams apple and then sweep up his chin and across his lips. His breath hitches, probably with pain, but I’m barely paying attention to him anymore. His nose is bleeding, possibly broken, and I’m pressing my fingers up and down the length of it, trying to for certain without being able to see it. He hisses a little, but otherwise takes it like we were trained to, like if the pain is nothing. 

“You’re nose is broken.” I announce when I’m done. “What did you do? You couldn’t have hit the wall already.”

“Except I did,” He protests. “It’s right here.”

“But that’s—”

“Impossible?” 

He reaches out, and his hand brushes against my stomach. I tense but his fingers are already stumbling over to grab my hand. He guides it out and presses it gently against a smooth wall. A wall that wasn’t there two minutes ago as we marched down the hallway. 

The cool temperature of the stones seeps into my hand and I rasp out a breath as I pull away from the wall and from Sigma. 

“What happened?” I ask, not really expecting a real answer. “How did that get there?”

Sigma’s voice is hushed. “I don’t know.” 

And then I’m pushing frantically past him to reach for his wall. Half afraid that it won’t still be  there, half afraid that it will. My fingers brush against stone and then I’m racing to the other side to check my side of the hallway. I sag with relief when I find it’s still there.

“Kappa—Kappa what’s  _ wrong _ ?” Sigma’s rushing to me. His hand collides with my elbow and then he’s sweeping up along my shoulder to my neck to my chin to my cheek. He cradles it gently even though his palm is rough calluses. His fingers are long enough that they push a little past my temple into my thick hair. I had braided it before I started the labyrinth, but it’s starting to come loose. For a moment, I think that I may forget to breathe. 

“Kappa?” He asks again. His voice is low, rough. 

“I’m fine,” I say, brushing his hand away. “I’m not the idiot who broke their nose. I was just checking to see—” My heart drops as I realize the one place I  _ didn’t  _ check, perhaps the most important place that needs to be checked—the hall behind us. 

I push Sigma out of the way as I run my hands back along the wall, terrified that they’ll meet a junction and we’ll find ourselves boxed in and trapped in this stretch of darkness. I heave a sigh of relief as I keep going and still encounter nothing. We’re fine; we’ll just have to double back earlier than I counted on, but I can live with that, even if it does mean heading  _ towards  _ the source of the tremor. 

“What is it?” Sigma asks. “What are you looking for?”

“The hallway,” I pant. “I just want to make sure it’s still there.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s smart.”

“Thanks.” 

I sink to the ground, emotionally and physically exhausted. I can’t do this. I’m going to fail the masters again and this time they really are going to kill me for the impertinence. I’m going to die down here and no one will care. No one will notice. No one will ever be able to find me in this interminable darkness and I will dissolve to dust and be forgotten. I choke down a sob as it all hits me. 

Either Sigma has heard or sensed my distress or he’s as exhausted as I am because a second later he slides to the ground too and scoots over until we’re sitting shoulder to shoulder. He fumbles in the dark for a minute for my hand and he gives it a quick squeeze. 

“I’m glad you’re with me, Kap.” He says. “Even if you don’t like to be called that.”

I push out a laugh at that then use the back of my free hand to wipe the tears I can feel streaming down my face. It’s been ages since I’ve cried; I don’t remember doing it since I joined the  _ Elitia  _ and in my scattered memories of life before, I can really only ever remember being hungry, but I never cried about it. Gods, this darkness is wreaking havoc on my character. First I spare Sigma, then I panic at standing on his shoulders and now this. No wonder I didn’t win. No wonder I disgraced my Masters. 

“Hey,” he bumps me with his shoulder but he releases my hand. Before I can miss his callused palm, though, he’s swinging his arm around my shoulder in a loose side hug. In spite of myself, I lean into his side. I recognize that he’s trying to comfort me; I’m not blind to it, but for the life of me, I can’t remember any time in my life when someone ever dared to show the same kindness to me, least of all someone who had known me for less than a day. 

And it’s nice, I realize, to be comforted. Well it is perhaps yet another sign of my weakness that’s sprouted since I failed the labyrinth, I appreciate the gesture. It takes all of my self control to not physically cling to Sigma as my life falls apart around me. He probably thinks I’m a weak, emotional cry baby now. I don’t need to go and make myself look even more pathetic. 

“I failed,” I sniffle. “I chose the wrong hallway and now it’s blocked off and who knows what else happened and now we’re going to be stuck wandering around in the dark down here forever, or we’ll die if we don’t find food and water.”

“Ohhhh, don’t be like that,” he scolds. “What’s this but a little setback? Failure is nothing. It’s not like I think you’re Alpha. We’ll get through this.”

I stiffen as ice works it was from my chest down my arms and legs at his words. “What does Alpha have to do with any of this?”

He pulls away, trying in vain to study me in the darkness. “It’s a joke, Kap,” he says slowly. “Because Alpha never fails. It’s okay to mess up here and there; we’re human. And, if I’m being honest, I don’t see how you’ve failed here. It’s not your fault that we got stuck down here. As for the rest of it? So a tremor came through and the path mysteriously closed up.” He laughs a little nervously. “But it’s not like you knew that would happen and we don’t know that it didn’t happen in the other hallway too. You made a plan—and by the way, I have to concede it was a pretty reasonable plan—and shit happened. Plans don’t always fall perfectly into place, you know. It’s okay for things to get a little messed up every now and then.”

I can still feel the ice seeping into my bones and the pounding mantra since he mentioned Alpha, mentioned  _ me _ , of  _ he knows, he knows, he knows, _ is still in the back of my mind, but for the first time, it’s occurring to me that Sigma really doesn’t want to hurt me. That maybe when we first met back in the big room, he wasn’t looking to kill me, but to find an ally, or, gods help me, a friend. I know that I’ve told myself a million times since we met that I could trust Sigma, but if I really trusted him, I wouldn’t have to say that. But I think that I can. I don’t think Sigma has it in him to scheme like I can. I don’t think he’s faking his cheery attitude and kindness to get me to lower my guard. I don’t know how it’s possible, given the training that I know we’ve both been subjected to, but I think that this is what he’s really like. 

No wonder he’s Sigma. I can’t imagine that someone like him would really have it in them to be a truly cold hearted assassin. Not like me. 

“We should rest,” I say quietly. “One hour each. I’ll take first watch. We can continue back left after.”

I can feel Sigma’s eyes still glued to my little corner of the darkness, trying to decide what came over me. 

“You knew her, didn’t you?” he says at last. His voice is carefully neutral. “Alpha?”

I try to dig into the stone a little with the tone of my boot. I think back to the girl he would have last remembered me to be: fearless, cunning, deadly, favored. I’ve fallen so far. I don’t even really know who I am anymore, and I find that I’m a little terrified of the person I may become in this darkness. What strength and resolve will I lose as I wander aimlessly down here? How quickly will I be reduced to madness as the change overcomes me?

“Yeah,” I respond. “I thought I did. I don’t know anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s dead.” The words fall heavily from my mouth, a half truth. I myself may not be dead, but the person I used to be is dead as surely as a dream is upon waking. No matter how hard I try, I’ll never be that person again. Even if I regain the Master’s favor, I’ve already fallen too far. Though I may try, it is a height that I will never again achieve. 

I hear Sigma freeze, and then fabric slides against some as he lies down next to me. “What do you mean? Did you kill her? That first day of trials—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, and my voice is too rough, too harsh. I turn my face away from Sigma, towards the empty stretch of hallway. “She’s dead, and that’s it.”

Again, I’m met by Sigma’s assessing silence. 

“Do you hate who you are?” he asks at last. “Do you hate being ‘Kappa,’ being this thing they made you? Is that why you hate that name?”

I rub my fingers along the seams of my boots. It’s good leather. Strong. A gift from the Masters for excelling in my training. 

“Do you?” I ask. I don’t know how to tell him that I hate that name because it’s a lie. That I hate that name because my failure here means that Kappa died for nothing, that I killed her for nothing. And dammit,  _ she let me _ . She fought back, but not for her life, not nearly as hard as she could have. She fought like if it was a casual sparring session, not the first trial for the emperor’s assassin. And when I finished, when I had disarmed her and brought her to her knees, I didn’t hesitate as I brought down the killing blow because I was so certain that I would win. I was so certain that later, I would look back at her death and know that it had counted for something. And I think she thought she could be certain of it too. And I think she loved me more than I loved her, because in the end, she made it easy for me. She didn’t fuss, she didn’t cry, she didn’t plead with me, and while she didn’t exactly smile, she wasn’t distressed, either. Just…calm. Like if she had known that this was going to happen and was happy to give her life to let me live my dream. 

I swallow the lump in my throat before I can choke on it. I’m definitely going soft down here in this darkness. 

“Yeah, I do,” Sigma says. “I really do hate it. Do you remember?” he asks suddenly. His voice grates against the darkness. “Do you remember what your name was before? Who you were before?”

I wrench my mind away from Kappa and think back to my time before the  _ Elitia _ . Before the Master’s came to my village with their heavy robes and politely deadly voices, and like shattered bits of glass, my mind produces memories. A dusty hearth. A dirty and tired looking woman with my eyes and hair. Two older boys who liked to joke and rough house just as much as they loved the routine, however awful, of their lives. A big man who’s not much more than a pair of legs to my childish memory. And a field. A field full of wildflowers that whipped against my face as I ran through them in the summer sun. 

“No.” I say. “No, I don’t remember anything.” I pause. “Do you?”

“I’m pretty sure my name was Jason.” He says. “and I think I had a sister. I don’t—I don’t remember what her name was anymore, but I know we lived by the sea, and I’m almost positive my father fished. I remember my mother used to sing. She would sing to us every night before we went to bed.”

“Do you miss them?”

I can feel him shrug beside me—his shoulder is right next to my knee—but he keeps going. I’m glad he does. I’m glad he’s fallen back into his usual cheerfully chatty Sigma self. 

“Not really, I suppose,” he says. “There’s not really very much to miss, is there?” He laughs and the sound is bitter in my ears. “I guess what I really miss is the feeling of it. The feeling that I was free to be my own person. The innocence of the little boy who would stand on the sand as the surf gathered around his ankles and dream. I miss him. Where did he go? Who would he have become?”

I reach out my hand and touch my knuckles to his temple. His hair, where the back of my hand brushes against it, is soft, though a little thick and coarse. It’s better than trying in vain to make out his face in the dark and a nice reminder that I’m still here and listening. 

“How did you get chosen?” I ask softly. The test with the bread in my village seems relatively rudimentary with hindsight. A simple test of ferocity, obedience and cunning. I wondered if he had to face the same. As much as the thought surprises me, I hope he didn’t. It doesn’t suit him. The animal desperation that fell over us the moment the bread was within reach. 

“They made us swim.” He says. His voice brushes gently over the memory. “They promised that whoever could swim out the farthest and come back the fastest would be cared for forever and that sounded really good to a kid who liked to stand around and daydream and because of that I decided I wanted to win, so I did.

“The older kids—the bigger kids—they kept pushing the pace, the distance. A few tried to drown me. But I slipped away and I went on and on and on until I was the farthest one out and then I came back. I didn’t rush. I didn’t push myself beyond the limits I knew I had. I just outlasted everyone and I won.”

I don’t know what to say for a long time after that and I get the feeling that the effort it took to dredge up and explain all that on top of everything else we’ve been through took enough of a toll on him that he might just go to sleep, if not resupply his energy before he speaks again. In fact, he takes so long that I almost think that he has drifted off to sleep when his voice slips through the darkness 

“What about you?” he asks. “What did you have to do?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, turning to face down the open hallway. “I survived. Now go to sleep. We have work to do yet.”

I almost cry with relief as I hear his breath deepen and slow. And then I tip my head against the wall and count the seconds along with my tears. 


	6. Chapter 6

I shake Sigma gently awake when the hour is up. I know I should have counted from when I first told him to rest (it wouldn’t have been my fault that he ate into his time by talking) but I gave him the full time. I could say that it’s because I want him fully rested or because I want to give him some time to heal a little, but I know the terrifying truth: Sigma is my friend. Forget the fact that we’ve known each other for less than twenty four hours, I feel that I can trust him. I want to trust him. I want to repay the kindness he has shown me. 

I don’t know why Kappa as my friend. All things considered, I could have been better to her. I could have helped her more than with the occasional harsh criticism or sparring session that was more for me to help burn off energy than to help either of us really train. I should have told her that I was sorry to kill her. I wish that I could tell her now that I regret it, but maybe I can honor her by being better to Sigma. Maybe I can somehow make amends by paying that kindness forward. 

Through my vigil though, I’m thinking about what the Masters have asked of me. I know that I will do it, I still feel that pressing need to redeem myself to them, but I wonder what the full price will be when I’m done. I’m wondering if Sigma will have to fall like Kappa did. I wonder, if I have to, whether I’ll be able to look him in the eye while I do it. And I hope, most of all, that if it does come to that, Sigma will be able to forgive me before the end. I hope he’ll understand. Unlikely, given what he’s told me, but I still hope. Against all reason, I hope because I would hate to know that in the end, he despised me. 

I curl up, back to the wall as always as Sigma takes the watch. I sink into sleep slowly and as it overcomes me, I feel the ghost of hesitant fingers gently brush back my hair. The memory of the sensation stalks through my sleep and I dream of running wildflowers that become sea spray and swimming through an ocean to sit at a kitchen table. A woman hums while she makes bread. She hands me a freshly carved slice, piping hot but soft. She reaches back to brush my cheek gently, but when she goes to say my name, no words come out. And I’m trying to understand, trying to understand because this woman is my  _ mother  _ and I know she’s saying my name but I can’t hear it and I need to know it, need to know who I am, but there’s a keening in my ears and although we haven’t moved away from each other she’s getting farther and farther away, still mouthing my name and I’m screaming at her, trying to get her to say it so I can hear—

“KAPPA!”

Sigma’s hands are holding my shoulders with a death grip as he shakes me awake. He’s close enough that when I reach out a hand to push him away it’s barely gone three inches when it connects with his nose. He yelps, but he pulls away. I start to sit up, leaning on my elbows. 

“What is it?” I ask. “What’s wrong? Was there another tremor? Did the hallways move?”

Sigma’s tone is odd. “Don’t you remember? You were screaming. You were screaming for someone to come back. Mana.”

It’s been ages, but I recognize the name I used to call my mother. My home dialect. I suppress the shudder that comes with the realization that I dreamed of my  _ mother,  _ who I haven’t thought of since I joined the  _ Elitia  _ while I try to dredge up pieces of the dream. All I can remember, though, is a slice of bread. Warm, soft, crusty edged bread. Utterly useless. And at the rate things are going, I’ll probably never see bread like that again. I honestly don’t know what’s more pathetic: that Sigma heard me screaming for my mother in my sleep or the fact that I want to cry over bread. 

I shake my head slowly, more out of habit than anything. “Bread?” I say. “I remember I was eating bread? Nothing else.”

Sigma takes a minute to processes that and I wish now more than ever that I could see his face. I can picture him struggling to hold back a smile and failing and deciding to throw it all to the wind and smiling anyways, big and broad, because it would match his laugh. Big and broad because that’s the only type of smile that would suit Sigma. 

“I afraid,” he says carefully. There’s laughter tinging his voice a happy pink. “I’m afraid,” he says again, “to know what your mental state is like right now if you have nightmares about bread.”

I swing out and punch him, hard, and in the shoulder by the feel of it. He yelps and then in spite of myself I’m chuckling and he is too and it’s growing into full blown laughter, the real kind, and it’s strange and sobering to think, but I know that this is the happiest moment of my life. 

Our laughter dies and Sigma scoots to sit next to me before he bumps me with his shoulder. “So who is it? What is it?”

“What?”

“Mana.”

“Oh.” I say. For the first time, it occurs to me that Sigma is from a different part of the empire. With a different native dialect. With a different environment, even. But I knew that. He told me. It’s just never really hit me until now how different our backgrounds are. And yet, we’ve become friends. “I don’t know,” I lie. “Probably the ghost of something from Before.”

“Do you have nightmares every time you go to sleep?”

I stiffen without really thinking about it. “What do you mean?”

I feel him shrug, trying to play it off casually. “Nothing. It just… sounded like you were having one last break too.”

I pause as I let that sink in. He thought I was having a nightmare. I had a vision of the Master’s and he thought—why did he think that? What tipped him off?

“Did I call out for people then too?”

His voice is ice cold. “No. Now come on,” he says, and his tone shifts, something lighter. Something to get my mind off the topic. “We should get going. We need to find water still.”

He stands, but I hesitate for a moment, still searching for lost fragments of my dream. I almost jump out of my skin when Sigma’s hand finds my shoulder and traces it’s way down to my hand. He pulls me to my feet. 

“Come on, no time for dawdling.”

I step away once I’m on my feet and look back down the tunnel of darkness that’s waiting for us. It’d be so easy to just stay here. To just stay here with Sigma and make jokes and talk and wait for the darkness to consume us. But I have a mandate with the masters that I have to follow through. And Sigma is  _ Elitia  _ too; he’d never just let us die. Let me die.

“You take the far side?” I ask. 

It’s strange. Now that I’ve decided I want to trust Sigma, I don’t want to leave his side, and I don’t want him to leave mine. But we have to track the walls. We have to make sure that nothing else changed with the tremor.

I hear him step over to it quickly, hand out so he doesn’t hit his nose again. 

“Got it. Hand?” 

I reach out my hand across the hallway, straining so that my fingers can brush his and we can be on our way.

“Where?” He calls, “Ah,” 

And then the tips of my fingers are bumping up against his and it’s a reminder that I’m not alone, not alone, not alone down here in the interminable darkness. I think about what Sigma said earlier, about how he’s glad that I’m with him down here. And I wish I could tell him that I’m glad he’s with me too, but I don’t know how to find the words to say it correctly, without sounding like a softhearted sap, so I just hold the thought in me and I imagine that it casts a light into the darkness and that for the first time since the trials, I can clearly see the path laid out in front of me. 

We walk for another four hours, talking the entire way. We keep the stories light and infrequent. There’s nothing really but a bloody history lurking in our past and neither of us are eager to review it with the other, although I’m certain our reasons for that choice are different. Sigma tells jokes, mostly, or sings quietly. I theorize about the layout of this place and how big it might be. 

When we come to the place with the stairs, I almost don’t register it because I’m distracted. Distracted by Sigma and his friendly voice. He asked me a while back what I looked like, so I described Kappa; her freckles on brown skin. Her big brown eyes. Her dark frizzy hair. I don’t mention my own brown hair or grey eyes. I don’t mention a whisper of myself, and even though I know it’s not, even though I know Sigma trusts me, even though I know he’s only trying to put a face to the voice in the darkness, it feels like a test. I do my best to pass. 

In return for my description, I asked for his, and when we reach the place with the stairs, I’m trying to build a picture of him that feels right, looks like someone I trained with for fourteen years, based off the description he gave me. Thick black hair. Green almond-shaped eyes. Dimples. I keep drawing blanks, and it’s driving me mad. 

It’s because I’m distracted that I don’t Immediately register it when the wall doesn’t change. But then I go a few steps, the feeling that I’ve missed something nagging at my soul. And then it hits me. The wall never opened up for the stairway: our way back to the everything we covered before the tremor is gone. We can’t go back. That option’s been taken off the table. The empty feeling that I’ve doomed us both spreads through me. 

“Sigma,” I say. I don’t bother to hide the tightness in my voice. 

He doesn’t try to hide the concern in his. “What is it?”

“The stairs are gone.”

A pause. 

“ _ What _ ?”

“The stairs—”

“Yes, I heard that. But… how? How can they be gone?”

I fight to keep my voice steady. “The same way a hallway can grow a wall blocking the way in two minutes?”

Sigma swears, quiet and quick. “Are we even in the same hallway?”

“I don’t see how we couldn’t be.”

“But it’s changed.”

“Yes.”

“How?” 

“The tremor,” I say, mind reeling. “Sigma, what if this is a prison? What if it changes to keep prisoners on their toes, lost and confused?”

“Putting walls where they weren’t before…” he starts. 

“And you can’t see what would move of change because it’s pitch black.”

“I bet it doesn’t happen at a regular interval, either. Like, they leave one pathway open for a long time and then the new one is a different time span, but nothing that can ever be predictable.”

“Because the inmates are clever.” I say, thinking back to what the Master’s called this place.  Sicarii Palatio. I’m rusty on the ancient language, but I think I know what it means. Palace of Assassins. 

“Because the inmates are probably  _ assassins. _ ” He hisses, voicing my thoughts, even though he probably doesn’t know the half of it. “Kappa, what if we’re not the first two they put down here? What if everyone who fails  _ Elitia _ training gets sent down here. What if every old assassin wasn’t killed, but brought here?”

“Why? I thought you believed we were down here as backups in case the new assassin, whoever they are, failed. In case they needed backups.”

“Or they’re building an army.”

“Who is?”

“The emperor, the Masters, I don’t know. Someone who has something to gain from having a good deal of assassins on tap to do their dirty work when the time comes.”

“Then why haven’t we met anyone else?” I say softly. “Where are the rest of us?”

Even from this distance, I can hear it when Sigma swallows. “I don’t know.”

“And what happens when we find them? Will they kill us?”

“I don’t know,” he says again. 

We let that truth fester in the silence. Although we’ve agreed not to dally anymore, we both take a moment in the darkness to process the fact that we many never get out of here alive. That we may spend the rest of our lives wandering around, stumbling through hallways that we can’t see and that can change in a moment’s notice. 

I officially hate my life. And whoever it was that stuck me down here instead of killing me in the first place. 

“Come on,” I say at last, trudging a step forward. “It’s better to keep moving. We don’t want to waste our time.”

I hear Sigma take a step on the other side of the hallway and just like that, one step at a time, we carry on. An hour goes by. Another one. We don’t talk anymore. I’m too busy listening for signs of life scratching through the hall. But there’s nothing. For all I know, there’s no one down here but me and Sigma. The changing walls could be the first of our hallucinations. We could be dying of dehydration already without even knowing it. I try to go back over how much time we had already spent, trying to see if I had miscounted somewhere, but it’s too hard to do while I’m trying to count the seconds right now. 

“How far have we gone?” Sigma asks after another hour. 

I can’t help but laugh, even if it is a little bitter. “From the wall or from where we lost the stairs?” I ask. 

“Wall,” he says curtly. 

“Eighteen and three quarter miles,” I say, once I’ve done the math. “We’ ve been walking for five hours, we’ll stop in three.”

“ _ Five hours?” _

“We walked longer yesterday with fewer breaks.”

Yesterday, today. I don’t care anymore. At this point, I’m counting everything by major events. Trials. Meeting Sigma. Stairs and intersection. Tremor. My life’s been reduced to a few catalytic moments. 

“How much longer?” 

“Fifty two minutes.”

“Blessed Rashidila,” he curses, invoking one of the four goddesses of the pantheon of eigĥt. The empire may be large, with many dialects of conquered peoples, but we share a religion. I suppose that we wouldn’t have, a long time ago, but by practice of the empire, everyone, from the poorest pauper to the emperor himself, worships the same gods. “We have to stop soon. I’m begging you.”

“Three hours.”

“That’s too long. Please, my feet are killing me.” 

“We agreed, Sigma.”

“Great. Let’s change that agreement.”

“Sigma, you’re being ridiculous.”

“Alright, how many more miles?”

I stay quiet. I don’t want him to freak out when he hears the number. 

“How. Many. More. Miles?” he demands. 

“Eleven and a quarter.”

My words are quiet, but they still carry to Sigma. He curses some more. Invokes more of our gods. 

“You know, if a holy man could hear you, you’d be doing penance for the rest of your life.”

“I don’t care; just please let us take a break in another three miles.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“Sigma, I said no.”

“If you don’t declare a stop, I’m stopping on my own.”

“Then I’ll leave you here.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I will. I swear on the god Rhythan that I will keep going and leave you here alone in the dark if you stop before I say.”

Sigma sucks in a breath. People swear by a lot of gods and goddesses, usually as the situation calls for it, but very rarely do they invoke their patron god. Rhythan, as the god of assassins and exiles, is our patron two times over now. If I break the vow, the consequence is an eternity of bad luck. As far as Sigma’s concerned, I break that vow and I’ve doomed myself. Bad luck is a deadly thing to have haunting you when you’re an assassin. 

“I can’t believe you just did that,” he whispers. 

“Well, I did. Keep walking.”

His reply is meek. “Okay.”

We barely walk eight minutes before Sigma finds a corner bend in the hall. I’m checking to see if my side goes on and we’ve reached another intersection when I hear something hit him behind me. I spin on my toe and drop into a fighting stance immediately, breathing silent. Here at last are the assassins we’ve been waiting to meet. Clearly, they’re not as friendly as accommodating as we had hoped. 

I tilt my head, trying to get a better gauge on the sound of the fight. There’s only one attacker, and from the sound of it, it’s a he. I wonder if it’s someone Sigma and I know from our time with the  _ Elitia,  _ another would-be imperial assassin. I wonder if he’s met any more of us—or anyone else, for that matter—while he’s been alone down here in the dark. And I wonder what that was like. At very least, I had Sigma. I wonder if those long hours in the darkness drove him mad. 

“Kappa,” Sigma chokes out. “A little help please?”

He yelps as he gets hit again, and I curse him as a fool for revealing that I’m here. Before, I at least had the advantage of surprise. 

His attacker grunts as Sigma lands a few hits on him. 

“Sigma?” I call. I think I can almost where the two of them are, but I can’t tell exactly where he is. I need to make sure I hit the right person when I strike. I may be willing to kill Sigma, but that doesn’t mean I want to, especially on accident. 

He grunts as he takes a hit before he replies. 

“Here!” He replies a second later. He throws out a couple of punches to make his attacker give up his location and I move silently towards them. 

They’re both panting now, stealth forgotten as they work air into their lungs and prepare for the next bout. I take another step towards the mystery attacker. His feet scuffles on the stone maybe a foot away as he prepares to move towards Sigma again, evidentially either forgetting me or dismissing me as a threat. I take advantage of that to make my move. 

He’s tall; significantly taller than me and probably a good amount taller than Sigma too. The difference doesn’t stop me though as I start landing kicks and punches on his back. He’s turning on me just as quickly as my attack started but I’m faster still. And now Sigma and I are standing shoulder to shoulder as we go on the offensive and drive our new friend into the corner I just found. He collapses against the wall when my foot collides with his jaw, and then he’s panting and scraping against the stone as he tries to scoot away. 

“You win,” pants. “Stop it, you win. Sigma—”

I deliver a hard kick to his side and I’m happy when I hit flesh instead of the wall. I have a good idea where he is, but I’m still just as blind as he is. All of my hits against him thus far have been lucky guesses. 

“Stop talking,” I snap. 

“Sigma,” he pants. “Please, it’s me, it’s me. It’s Rho.”

Besides me, Sigma stills and then falls to his knees and scrambles towards his attacker. 

_ “Rho?” _ he asks. “How did you get here? I thought you were dead!”

The attacker—Rho—laughs curtly. “I could ask the same of you.”

And just like that, the two of them are chummy buddies, leaving me to stand there, literally in the dark on the matter. I’m about to butt in and start demanding some answers when Sigma finally remembers me. 

“Kappa,” he says, laughter coloring his voice. “This is Rho. We knew each other back before…”

He trails off and I know what we’re all thinking. Back before the trials. Back when we were all part of the  _ Elitia _ . Back before this hell. 

“Epsilon is dead.” He says quietly. I get the feeling he’s telling it more to Rho than me, but it still cracks my heart a little. I didn’t work with Epsilon a lot, but I still remember him. He always seemed so nice. Quiet. He was a lot like Kappa. Mostly I’m just surprised that Sigma managed to kill him. The difference in their rank is… remarkable, but then, I suppose I don’t know all the circumstances. And I suppose that I don’t really know Sigma. 

“You killed him?” Rho asks. 

“Yeah.” 

I hear Rho pat Sigma’s shoulder. “You did what you had to.”

“I could have refused to kill him.”

“And then you’d both probably be dead. No, Sigma, it’s better this way.”

They both lapse into silence in memory of a forgotten friend. While they’re lost in memory, I settle down across from them. To be honest, I don’t really remember Rho. I have a vague feeling that he’s more of the dark and brooding type, but I don’t know for sure. Certainly, his friendship with Sigma is making me second guess that. I can’t see how anyone can be friends with Sigma and not have his good humor rub off on them. It’s certainly rubbed off on me. 

“You were in the labyrinth?” I ask. 

Rho coughs. I imagine he nods. “Yeah, yeah I was.”

“But you failed.”

“Clearly.”

“How?”

“Look,” Rho snaps. “You may be all buddy buddy with Sigma now, Kappa, but I barely remember you, and what I do remember, I don’t like. You used to hang around with the upper cut all the time, like if somehow that made you better than the rest of us. You let them treat you like shit—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” My voice is quiet. But there’s a deadly edge to it. Next to Rho, I hear Sigma suck in a breath.

“I think I do,” Rho sneers. “You think those snobs were your friends? They were glorified killers. Heartless, all of them. I bet that they just wanted another person to worship the ground they walked on. I bet they just kept you around for laughs. I bet they didn’t even know what a true friend looked like! Wouldn’t know if they spat in their smug little faces!”

I can’t help myself. I’m launching myself at Rho before he’s even finished the last sentence, screaming at him that he take that back, that he take it all back  _ right now _ and then Sigma is grabbing my shoulder, dragging me away, trying to calm me down.

“Yeah,” Rho mutters. “Tame the bitch. She’s as bad as her stupid little ‘friends.’”

“Rho!” Sigma scolds. “Apologize, that was rude.”

“I’m not apologizing to her.” Rho mutters.

“Rho,” and this time Sigma’s voice holds and unspoken warning. I’m not sure what it is, but clearly Rho’s been on the wrong side of it often enough. 

“I’m sorry,” Rho mocks. 

Sigma’s silence is threat enough.

“Fine. I’m sorry, okay? I take it back.”

“All of it?” I grit out. 

“Just the part about you being a bitch.”

I can hear the smirk in his voice and it’s almost enough for me to go after him again, but Sigma, standing between us, stops me.

“He’s not worth it,” Sigma says, leaning forward to breathe the words quietly in my ear. Before, it would have been disturbing that he could find me so quickly in the dark with just a hand on my shoulder and the sound of my breathing to guide him. Now, it’s oddly comforting, a reminder that even though Sigma and Rho knew each other in the  _ Elitia _ , Sigma has claimed me as a friend too, and that he knows me probably better than anyone ever has in a very long time. 

“Are you okay?” Sigma asks, louder this time. He’s stepped back a little to give me some space. 

“I’m fine.”

Over in the corner, Rho snorts. 

“Something funny, Rho?” Sigma asks. There’s an edge to his voice that feels foreign after all the time I’ve spent listening to him. 

“Only that you’re more concerned about her than me.”

“Rho…”

There’s a weary reprimand in Sigma’s voice. 

“I’m just saying.” Rho replies, his voice floating over to us in the dark. 

“They were my friends,” I say. My voice is soft, but I know it carries. I speak a little louder as I continue. “You may not believe it, but they were. They cared about me and I cared about them and they’re gone now, so I beg you, please, do not speak ill of the dead.” My heart pings as I think about the companions I’ve probably lost. Beta. Gamma. Delta. “Please,” I say again. My voice is uncomfortably rough. “Please, they were the only family I had.”

Rho doesn't snap back a reply to that, but I can almost feel the moody silence spilling from his corner. I don't understand how Sigma could be friends with him. Rho is so...bitter. It's as a abrasive as a knife to the heart.

I can't help but wonder if Sigma is harboring a similar resentment. I wonder how he'll react when he finds out who I am. Maybe I'll kill him before that. As much as I hate to admit it, I don't think I could stand for Sigma to be prejudiced against me because of my rank. I've been thinking about what he said before about how he hates being Sigma and the  _ Elitia _ and everything he's become.

I don't know if I agree with Sigma. For better or worse, the  _ Elitia _ was my home for as long as I can remember. Life before that may as well be dust in the wind. I meant what I said to Rho, even if I spoke with Kappa's voice. The people I knew that the  _ Elitia _ — my friends — were the only family I ever really knew, and I will miss them for as long as I live.

I move away from Sigma and Rho to step down the hallway that Rho came down a ways. This close, I can understand what Sigma meant before about "damp air." It's almost like the air in the room we woke up in, but not quite. Like if this is a remnant of that, carried a little ways from the source.

"Rho," I call, the thought striking me.

"What do you want now?"

I jog back towards them. "Can you describe the area you came to in?"

Rho chokes out a laugh. "What does that matter? We're all going to die down here anyways, no matter how much you know about the place, Princess."

"Just tell me,"

Eager. My voice it to eager. He probably thinks I'm crazy.

"Why do you want to know?" Sigma's voice is slow, trying to make the connections. I have to give him credit for that. He may not be Beta or Kappa or any of other old friends, but he's trying. He's learning.

"The air's damp," I say, impatient. "Like it was in the big room. We've walked a lot. We could have circled back around."

Sigma's brow crinkled. "But then why wouldn't we have-- the river."

"We could be on the other side now." I finish.

"Wait," and that's Rho's voice, butting in where he’s not wanted. "What do you mean, big room?"

I imagine him turning his head back and forth between our voices, bewildered, and I feel a twinge of that glee that comes whenever someone who once excluded you is excluded themselves. 

“When Kappa and I first got here,” Sigma explains, “We woke up in this big room. Kappa then proceeded to kick my ass--”

Rho barks out a laugh. “And you still think you can trust her?”

“We’re friends now,” I snap. Sigma has settled down onto the floor again, but I’m still standing, arms crossed. 

“Right,” Sigma say, reaching out to pat my leg blindly in the darkness. “Anyways, so she beat me up and when I came to she was being all creepy and shit but after that I started walking away and we ran into a river. She just wanted to leave but I wanted to measure it so I threw some stones and we found out there was space on the other side.”

“But as neither of us felt like swimming in the dark,”I continue, “We let it be and just started walking down a hallway that came off the big room.”

“So, what,” Rho says. I want to pummel him for his stones. “You think you came full circle? How long has it been since you first got to that room?”

“It’s plausible.” I say. “Given the general shape of the path, recent events, etc.”

“We should go back,” Sigma says. 

“What?” I shout. “Back down the way we’ve come? Sigma, we already know that’s a dead end.”

“No,” he says.I imagine him waving his hand to wave my comment way. I get the feeling that Sigma is the kind of person who talks with his hands a lot. “No, back the way Rho came. We can check out if we’re right.”

“No,” Rho says. 

I start at that. “Why not?”

“Look,” Rho says. “The door where I was only just opened up. I don’t want it to close and be trapped in there again.”

“How long were you trapped?” Sigma asked. He actually sounds concerned. He and Rho really must be friends after all. 

Cloth rustles against stone as Rho shrugs. “Hours?” He says. “I don’t know. I slept some, and when I first woke up, someone attacked me.”

I can feel his glare cut through the darkness. 

“Probably her.”

“I woke up by Sigma,” I snap. “I didn’t even know there was anyone else down here.”

“Says you,” He mutters. 

“Rho,” Sigma says quietly. “You can trust Kappa. Besides, I was there when she woke up. I actually came to before her. That’s the only way I knew she was there; before she went quiet, I could hear her breathing.”

“Fine,” Rho says. There’s a deadly edge to his voice. “But I reserve the right to be  skeptic.”

Sigma’s sigh is long suffering, and I get the feeling that Rho’s attitude is something he’s been dealing with for a while. I can’t help but wonder how they met, and why they became friends. 

“Better now than too late, Sigma,” I say. “We already know that our clock is ticking and if Rho thinks the door may close on us randomly…”

“Yeah,” he says. I listen as he heaves himself up. “Let’s go. Come on Rho. I’m assuming you don’t want us to leave you alone here in the dark?”

“We shouldn’t go back, Sigma.” He grumbles. “It’s pointless.”

“Is there water there?” Sigma asks. 

Rho is quiet for a minute. Being as stubborn as a child who knows his parents have the final say. 

“Yeah.”

“Then we go back.”

I hear Sigma swallow and I know his throat is as dry as mine, a fact that seems even more pressing now that we know there’s water near by. 

“Sigma--”

“Rho,” and this time Sigma’s voice is edged like I’ve never heard it before. I think back to the oath I swore just a few minutes ago to leave Sigma behind and I get the feeling that Sigma’s about to pull a page from my book. 

“You can either stay here with no guarantee that Kappa will come back, keep going the way you were headed, although I promise you that it’s a dead end, or you can come with. It’s your choice, but we’re going, and we will leave you behind if you don’’t make a choice in the next two minutes.”

“I don’t have to listen to you,” Rho snobs. 

“Fine. You’re right. You don’t. Come on Kappa.” I hear Sigma rise and then feel his shoulder as he brushes past me. “Let’s go. We don’t need him anyways. You got the right wall?”

I smirk and take a few steps in the right direction until my fingers brush stone. “Yeah.”

“Then we’re off. Bye, Rho. It was nice to run into you again. Good to know you’re alive...for now.”

“Wait!” 

Sigma doesn’t stop even as Rho screams after him. 

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t come with you.”

“Actually,” I mumble. “You did, but, whatever.”

I listen as Rho runs to catch up with us and then he falls into step between us. 

“You two know this is completely mad, right?” He asks. 

“We need water,” Sigma says grimly. “After that, we can work out a better plan, but Kap and I are running down the clock.”

“We’re already pretty dehydrated,” I add. 

Rho scoffs, but keeps coming with us. “I’m telling you, it’s a dead end.”

“No less of a dead end than we reached,” Sigma says grimly. “Maybe we’re missing something here.”

“Can you describe the room?” I ask Rho. The stones slide by beneath my fingertips. 

Fabric rustles as he shrugs. “Rectangular. Width definitely longer than the length; from what I could tell, perhaps more than double the size. Water on two sides. After a while--and I mean a really long while--a tremor came through so I checked everything over again to see if anything had collapsed and a door had appeared in the middle of the long wall.”

I freeze at the mention of a tremor, but Sigma beats me to a response. 

“Like an earthquake?” He asks. 

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

“I figured we were maybe underground or something.”

“That’s an interesting theory,” Sigma says carefully. I wonder why he doesn’t outright share our this-is-a-prison-for-assassins theory. 

“How long has it been since you left it,” I ask. “The room, that is.”

“An hour, maybe two,” Rho replies. “Why?”

I consider telling him about how our hallway closed up, but decide against it. He may be friends with Sigma, but I still don’t entirely trust Rho and I don’t want to give him more information than I have to. For now, he’s just another person I’ll have to kill when the time comes, although I imagine taking his life will be easier than taking Sigma’s. 

“Sigma’s feet are aching,” I say with a smile. “But we’re not stopping until we get there.”

Across the hallway, I hear Sigma groan as he calculates the miles ahead.


	7. Chapter 7

When we step through the doorway into Rho’s room, instinct tells me that it’s the same one that Sigma and I were in before. It has that same airy quality and just general sense of vastness that it did then. If Rho is right, then this is what was on the other side of the water. The question is, if the door over here didn’t open up until the tremor came through, where would the left path have taken us originally if not a dead end? Where would the right path have finished? 

Sigma collapses the moment we’re through to rest his feet. It wasn’t quite the three hours I had told him to plan on before, but it was still close to two. Even my feet are starting to feel twinges of pain, especially now that I know I can rest. Rho hangs back a little, waiting for one of us to issue a judgement about the place. We didn’t talk much as we walked, largely because Rho’s general malignance made it hard to talk to him or even Sigma without him throwing in a rude comment. But Sigma and I need to talk alone together, and soon. I want his opinion on all of this, if not at very least an explanation of Rho.

“How long was it between the door opening up and you deciding to walk through it?” I ask, continuing to explore the cavern. 

“I dunno,” he says. “Maybe three hours? I don’t keep track of time very well.”

“Why didn’t you leave as soon as you found the door?” Sigma asks. “If you had been trapped in here for so long, why weren’t you eager to get out?”

“I wanted to be sure it was safe. And then once I figured it was because nothing had come through, I took a little nap, drank some water, and then headed out.”

“So it could have been more than three hours,” I say. I’ve walked farther away from the two of them, but I’m still listening to them talk. I’m trying to measure out this cavern, see if it aligns with the one Sigma and I were in before. 

“Why do you even care?” Rho shouts back at me.

I hear Sigma murur back “Kappa is very time-oriented.” 

I smile a little, but my fifty-eighth step ends with my foot touching water. I step back before I put my weight down fully and then scoot forward until I meet the edge of the stream. “Sigma!” I call. 

“What does she want now?” Rho grumbles. 

I hear Sigma tell him to calm down and then listen as Sigma’s feet come running towards me.

“Watch out, there’s water,” I warn. “I’m over here. Slow down so you don’t hit me and send us both in.”

His steps slow to a jog and then to a walk and then we’re fumbling around in the dark as we try to find each other. His hand bumps my breast but then I step away and grab his shoulder before I guide him carefully to the water’s edge. 

“Right...here.” I say. 

I crouch down with him and listen as his hand touches the water. 

“Think it’s the same place?” He asks softly. 

“Yeah,” I reply. “I do.”

He stands, but I take a minute to scoop up some water and drink. When I stand with him, I can hear him licking the water off his hands. It feels like forever since we’ve had a decent drink, and we’ve walked so for. 

“Why didn’t you tell Rho about what happened to us--with the tremor,” I ask. 

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “ I guess I just didn’t want him to freak out any more about the door closing.”

“Sigma,” I say. His words may be true, but they don’t feel like a whole truth. 

He sighs. “And I just didn’t want to tell him,” he admits. “Do you ever feel like this darkness is changing you? Carving out who you are?”

I cross my arms and look down at where I know and invisible river runs at my feet. “Yes.”

“Just, for whatever reason,” he says quietly, “I’m reluctant to lay all my cards on the table.”

“I get that,” I say. “The darkness--you look at it sometimes and wonder if it’s looking back. It can make you feel vulnerable, and and people who vulnerable are cagey.”

“Does it make you feel like that?” he asks. “Do you think it’s staring back at you?”

I make myself face him, force my voice to be strong. “It’s just darkness.” I say. “It doesn’t have eyes.”

I’m met again by Sigma’s assessing silence. I have the unnerving feeling that even though he can’t physically see me, he can still see through me and every word I’ve said. I’m used to keeping my own secrets and council. Even Kappa, who I thought of as my best friend, was not privy to many of my thoughts and machinations. We would talk and joke, of course, but at the end of my day, I only ever relied on myself to get where I needed to go. I still do. Sigma may have become my friend, but this mission that the Masters have given me doesn’t involve him. At some point, he will die. I can feel it. I don’t know when that happens if I’ll be relieved or disheartened. 

I turn and start picking my way back towards Rho. I need the rest of his story. I need to understand what happened so I can paint a better picture of this place myself. I’ll pace out the length of the long side of the room later. For now, I need answers. 

“Rho,” I call. 

“Will you ever stop ordering us around, princess, or should we just start bowing and scraping to you now?”

I grit my teeth but don’t reply. If I wanted to, I remind myself, I could kick his ass. But I won’t. Because that wouldn’t help anything, even if sometimes it feels like it would. 

“You said someone knocked you out when you first came to?”

“Yeah, but you knew that already.”

“Can you describe anything about them?”

“Why do you need to know, princess? Afraid I’ll be able to identify you later?”

“Rho,” Sigma says with as sigh as he comes up next to me. “I already told you it wasn’t her. Just tell us what the guy was like.”

“Why should I tell her?” Rho asks. “For all I know it’s one of her little buddies and she’s planning on killing us both first chance she gets.

“She’s not going to kill you, Rho,” Sigma groans. 

“How do you know?” He snaps. “Just because she hasn’t killed you yet doesn’t mean she isn’t planning to.”

The words hit uncomfortably close to home. I step forward. 

“I actually almost did kill him.”

“What? You going to tell me it was on accident? That he’s your friend now and you don’t kill your friends?”

“No,” I snap. “It was deliberate. I had my arm around his neck. I almost strangled him.”

“She did.” Sigma says, backing me up. “She held on until I passed out.”

“Why’d you let him live?”

“I don’t really know,” I admit. “At first I just wanted to see if he could give me any answers. Then I guess I just kept him around for company.”

In the darkness, Sigma reaches out, finds my arm then my hand, and gives my fingers a quick squeeze. 

“The darkness is easier to tackle when there’s someone with you,” He says gently. 

“Awww, isn’t that a big load of warm fuzzy,” Rho grumbles. “You honestly expected me to believe that?”

“It’s the truth,” I say. “Believe it or not, that’s what it is.”

“Please, Rho,” Sigma says, settling down on the floor. “Just tell us what happened.”

He still has his hand around mine and he tugs on it to ask me sit down next to him. I roll my eyes, but I comply, shoulder pressed against his. And it’s nice, I realize, to have that contact. To have that reminder that I’m not alone in the dark. 

Rho sighs heavily, as if we’ve bullied him into it, but he starts anyways, and I’m grateful. I resist the sudden urge to lean my head on Sigma’s shoulder as he starts. 

“I woke up here after the labyrinth. I was in a room where some floor tiles fell away if you stepped in the wrong place. Some of them were already missing, like if someone had been through there before. Anyways, I was going along, carefully feeling out every step because as far as I could see, there was no pattern to the madness. The floor trembled and part of the path I had already taken fell away. I knew I was taking too long, so I moved faster, thought about where I was stepping less. I was almost to the door when the next tremor came. I took a step and fell through. Everything went black just as my fingertips brushed the threshold. 

“Then I woke up here. I called out to see if anyone was around and two seconds later, someone punched me in the gut. I fought back, but they moved pretty quickly and next thing I knew I took a hit to the face and it was lights out all over again. When I came to, I could hear voices--people talking, not fighting--but they were too indistinct to make out and I was still pretty out of it, so I just let it go. Later, I tried to get up and find them, but they were gone and I only ran into a river.”

“The voices were probably us,” Sigma says. “When I woke up after Kappa knocked me out, we talked a little and then I walked towards the river, where we chatted a little more and then went on our way.”

I snort. “‘Chatted.’” I say, imagining the quotation marks. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it.”

Sigma bumps me with his shoulder and I can feel the silent chuckle quaking through his body. 

“Carry on. Rho. What happened next?”

Rho’s confusion at Sigma and I’s brief exchange is palpable, but after a moment, he goes on. 

“I drank a little water, then set off to explore. I followed the edge of the river--”

“Actually, it’s more of a stream,” Sigma butted in. “Or a canal. I think it’s a little too small to be a proper river.”

“Do you want me to tell the story or not, Sigma?” Rho snaps. 

“Sorry. Keep going.”

“Anyways, I followed the  _ river _ to the right a ways and then I ran into a hard right turn. Water came down that side too and flowed into the river I had already found. I followed that side until I hit a wall, then followed that wall until I hit another, which I followed until it met up with the water again. No door, at least not to start.”

“So where’d your attacker go?” I ask. 

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Rho says cheerfully. “He’s gone and that’s all that matters.”

“Better question is who it was,” Sigma says. 

“Another one of the  _ Elitia  _ who failed the labyrinth?” I hypothesize. “We all seem to be ending up here.”

“Or someone else.” Sigma says. 

“Who?” Rho buts in. “You don’t think we’re down here alone?”

“Clearly not,” I snap. “But you’re too much of a numb-skull to be much of a help down that avenue aren’t you?”

“There it is!” Rho shouts. “There’s that condescending, superior attitude. You see, Sigma? You see what I mean? This is why I hate you brats!”

I move to launch myself at him, but Sigma grabs the back of my jacket and pulls me back down next to him. 

“You two,” He shouts, “need to stop it right now! You’re like squabbling children and I’m sick of it! Now,” He continues, a little calmer. “We need to work together and respect each other until we can get out of here. And then we can all go our separate ways if that’s what you want. For now, please focus on the task at hand.”

“So can you tell us anything about this guy, or did he take you down to quickly for you to get a reed on him.” I grit out. 

“He was shorter than me,” Rho says. “And a little wider. Well muscled. Well trained. I don’t know anything else. And frankly, I fail to see how any of that is helpful.”

I lean back and huff out a breath, taking a minute to examine the darkness around us like if I could see through it to the room I’ve laid out in my mind’s eye. 

“So if I had just beaten a guy I didn’t know in a strange place where I couldn’t see anything, what would I do?”

“Well, what did you do?” Sigma asks. “That’s basically what you did to me.”

“I mapped out the room.” I admit. “Figured out how big it was and what the major features were. If I’m right and this is all part of the same room, then the schematics are essentially the same.”

“Ok.” Sigma says. “Stay on track. You map out the room. What next.”

“I waited,” I say, “to see if you knew anything.” I glance over at where I think Rho is. “Did you ask your attacker any questions? Like who they were or what this place was?”

“Yeah,” Rho said. “I asked where we were and if he had put me here.”

“Then he knew you couldn’t tell him anything useful.”

“So why didn’t he kill me?”

I shrug, even though I know only Sigma knows I do it. “I don’t know. Maybe he thought you weren’t worth killing.”

“So then how would he have gotten out?” Sigma asks. “The door didn’t appear until  _ after  _ the tremor. So unless he runs the place somehow, shouldn’t he have been trapped down here too?”

I sigh, trying to think through the problem. A second later, the answer presents itself, clear as day. “He swam.”

“What?” They say in unison. 

“He probably went into the river to see if it could get him anywhere. He swam.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to ask us to do the same,” Rho says quietly. 

“Why not?” Sigma asks. “It’s our only viable option right now. The hallway we came from ends in a dead end. The only path we haven’t explored is the stream.”

“No.” Rho says. “I don’t do water. Especially creepy water that I can’t see.”

“What’s the problem?” I ask, crinkling my nose. “It’s just water. We all know how to swim. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Rho scoffs. “Let me see...We could drown. We could get attacked by some creature I’m sure is lurking in there. We could reach the end and then be stuck against the gate and not be able to get free for all eternity.”

“Rho,” Sigma says, laughter coloring his voice. “Don’t you think you’re being a tad dramatic?”

“Dramatic?” Rho objects. “I’m being realistic! I don’t care if freaky ghost attacker guy probably went into the water; I’m not getting in there for a cutesy little swim and you can’t make me!”

“There’s no other way out,” I point out. 

“Fine,” Rho snaps. “Then I’ll walk the halls until something changes.”

“That’s actually insane,” Sigma says. 

“I don’t care! I’m not going in the water!”

“Are you afraid?” I ask. I start it as a tease, but then realization hits me. The second day of the trails, we all had to face our fears to prove that we could function in spite of them. My platform titled and wobbled the more I panicked about being up so high. I wonder what they did to Rho. I wonder how close he came to dying. 

“What?” Rho asks. His tone isn’t so much as pugnacious anymore than it is surprised. 

“Are you afraid,” I repeat. “Of drowning?”

Sigma sucks in a breath. “Rho--”

“Of course I’m not afraid!” Rho snaps. “You said yourself that we can swim. Why would I be afraid to drown?”

“The why won’t you get in the water?” I ask. I keep my voice cool. The plan of how to bend Rho to my will is laid out clearly in my mind. 

“I told you why I’m not getting in there!” Rho replies. “It’s dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous as staying here.”

I stand up and brush some dirt of my pants. “Sigma,” I say, “We should go. If Rho wants to follow us later, he can, but I get the feeling he was right about that door and that it will close eventually. We know that the way back is blocked and it would take too long to retrace our steps and then wait and see if anything changes. We have to go now. This is the only way.”

He sighs. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Sigma stands up besides me. “Last chance, Rho. I’m not going to stay here to die and you know I will leave you behind. I don’t care if you’re afraid of drowning or not. Conquer your fear. You’re a trained member of the  _ Elitia _ , for crying out loud. Fear should be nothing to you. Now come on. I don’t have time for your whining.”

He turns and sets off and I move quickly to go with him. 

“We should go to the source first,” I tell him. “See if there’s anything there and then we can follow it along until the end. Check everything out--just like we did with the hallways.”

“Agreed.” He says. “Where are you? I don’t want to jump in blind here.”

I chuckle, but reach out and find his hand. “You are jumping in blind, no matter what, but I’m right here.”

“Good,” he says. I can hear the smile in his voice. “I wouldn’t want to go without you.”

“Do you think he’ll come along?” I ask, starting to steer us towards the corner where--from best I can tell--the water originates. “Rho, that is.”

“Yeah,” Sigma says quietly. “He obstinate, but he’ll see the logic of it in a second. He just hates being told what to do.”

“I can tell. How did he survive the _ Elitia? _ I can’t imagine the Masters appreciated his attitude.” 

“Honestly?” Sigma says. “I don’t know. I don’t know how any of us did. We just did, I guess. I still can’t decide if that makes us lucky or stupid.”

I squeeze his hand tightly. “Lucky.” I say. “It has to be.”

“Rho?” Sigma calls back over his shoulder. “We’re leaving. It’s now or never.”

A tremendous sigh echoes around the chamber. “I’m coming.” 

We wait in silence as we listen to Rho run towards us. When he reaches us, Sigma explains the plan.

“That’s a dumb plan,” Rho says when he’s finished. 

“It’s our only plan.” Sigma says. 

“Well then, I think it’s only fair that you two go first. If anything bad happens, maybe I can get out before it happens to me.”

“Thanks, Rho.” Sigma says. He’s joking, but there’s a tightness in his voice. 

“Oh, my pleasure.”

Sigma squeezes my hand. “You ready?”” He asks. 

“Yeah.”

“Hold on to me,” he says. 

And then, like idiots, we jump in. 

OOO

I’m instantly frozen to the bone and the water, for all it’s quiet rushing, moves faster than I expected. It takes tremendous effort to hold onto Sigma as I’m thrown against the far wall (rises straight up, this is the end of the chamber) and then around a sharp right corner and I’m fighting to keep my head above the water, I’m fighting to breathe…

Through it all my hand remains tight around Sigma’s and he holds onto mine with a grip that threatens to crush my bones, but I take comfort in that grip. It steadies me to know that I’m not about to be left alone to drown, that he will be with me through it all, that we are doing this together.

And Sigma is doing better than I am. I remember what he said, about his first test with the Masters and how he lived by the sea. If anything, it proves that he’s a good swimmer, which gives me all the more faith in him, but I see now that Sigma is also determined and enduring and strong and it makes me glad that, of everyone I’ve ever met, he’s the one I found in the darkness, because even though he’s only Sigma, he’s the strongest person I’ve ever met, and I needed that. 

I’m not afraid as we are carried through the water. I’m not afraid as Sigma calls back to Rho that it’s safe to jump in after us. I’m not afraid as we rush towards our destiny, even as my mind screams at me that the water may dive off into the pit. 

I’m not afraid. 

I squeeze Sigma’s hand a little tighter as the water surges and we are pushed over the edge. 

OOO

We fall for what feels like an eternity, tumbling through black and empty space, though I’m trying to remember the proper way to fall from a great height, like our instructors at the  _ Elitia _ taught us. 

Through it all, I keep my hand tight around Sigma’s. 

And he keeps his tight around mine. 

We both black out before we reach the bottom. 


	8. Chapter 8

The first thing that hits me when I wake up is that there’s too much light. The second is that I can see my hands. I scramble quickly to my feet at that realization, trying to take in my surroundings as quickly as possible. 

Mirrors. There are mirrors everywhere. On the walls on the ceiling on the floor. I can see a thousand versions of myself reflected back at me in them: still soaking wet from my punge in the river, bronze hair turned a shade darker and plastered to my face and skull. My familiar black training gear, also soaking wet, hanging from my body like old funeral clothes. The red A for alpha stitched onto my right bicep, a smaller one on my collar. Big grey eyes and cheeks with a constellation of freckles that stand out a little more than normal on my pale skin. In the mirror behind me, I can see Sigma’s wet black head, the twitch of his muscles as he wakes up. Rho’s behind him, starting to go through the same motions. 

I swallow as I take a step back. 

I could kill them both; it’d be easy, especially since we’re all so disoriented right now. I should kill them; once they see me, the game will be up. Kappa and I may have been built similarly, but we look nothing alike, not to mention the dead giveaway of the alphas on my uniform. If I don’t kill them, they’ll probably team up and kill me. 

I take another step back. 

I’d love to kill Rho; it’d be easy. He’s been a pain in my ass since we met a couple of hours ago. I don’t like him. I have no attachment to him. But Sigma…

I  _ need _ Sigma. If I’m going to get out of the  _ Palatio _ , I honestly believe that I’m going to need a little help, a little back up. And, as uncomfortable as the notion is, Sigma is my friend, perhaps more so now than Kappa ever was. He’s so trusting. Killing him would feel like a betrayal. 

I take a third step away from them. 

If I kill Rho, Sigma will never forgive me. If I kill Sigma, I may not ever be able to forgive myself. It’d be best to run and let them lose me, as much as someone can be lost in a maze of mirrors. Let Rho convince Sigma that I’m the liar and cheat he believes me to be. Let them both find their own fate down here while I race towards my own. If I’m going to run, I need to run now. I won’t have much time to try and vanish in a world where everything is visible. 

But I’m too late, because there are Rho’s eyes, staring at me with furious accusation. There are Rho’s hands, shaking Sigma awake as he keeps a murderous eye pinning me in place. There is Sigma’s face, twisting with confusion as the girl he sees isn’t the one he expects. There’s Sigma’s head, tilting as I’ve so often pictured it, as he tries to make sense of the situation. There’s Sigma’s mouth, forming a question. 

“Kappa?” He asks. 

I take a step farther away. 

“No, not Kappa,” Rho says, pulling Sigma to his feet. He opens his mouth to say more, but is too focused on me to react to the fourth figure rising in the mirrors, a figure I know so well it makes my heart ache…

“Alpha!” Beta screams, as he rushes to my aid as I have rushed to his so many times before as we learned to kill together. 

OOO

Beta and I may short work of Rho and Sigma. Beta suggests we kill them. I tell him to take pity on their souls. Beta looks at me funny, but lets the matter rest. It was almost unnerving, how easy it was; Rho, even with the warning, couldn’t react fast enough before Beta charged into him and while Rho was so occupied, I took out Sigma. 

I was right. The look of betrayal in his eyes felt like a knife in my heart as I landed a blow hard enough to knock him out. Unfortunate, but necessary. I need to be able to talk to Beta about my assignment from the Masters in private, and I need to have both Sigma and Rho incapacitated when they wake up. At very least, I owe Sigma an explanation, and I can’t have him, or Rho, trying to fight me as I try to give it. Rho, I just want out of my way. To be honest, though, I’m taking a small delight in the sight of his blooming back eye and the bruise on his temple that Beta gifted him with along with the few visible injuries that linger from his earlier fight with Sigma.  

For now, though, I settle down across from Beta with my back against one of the mirror walls. Across the hall, a thousand of our reflections do the same. 

At first, I just take him in, all the familiar contours of his face, his ever messy black brown hair and soft cinnamon skin. I didn’t know exactly where in the empire he was from; the  _ Elitia  _ was essentially a cross section of every ethnicity out there, but he had every marker of the Calino people. 

Not that it mattered to me where Beta was from. We were supposed to be nameless, invisible. We had dated once when we were younger, purely because I was Alpha and he was Beta, but it hadn’t worked out. We had parted ways amicably and, while may not have been pitted against each other in the ring, we were still friends. We understood each other. We had learned to fight with each other from the first. If I would be able to explain my predicament to anyone, it was Beta. 

We don’t waste time with hugs at being reunited or apologies over what we’ve done. In the  _ Elitia,  _ we were trained to always look forward, to focus on the problem at hand. It was a lesson that Beta and I excelled at. 

“You got down here through the river,” I say. 

Beta nods solemnly. “I woke up and I could hear someone breathing, so I stayed quiet, found them and took them down.”

“Rho,” I say, jerking my head towards his unconscious figure.  “Good for you; he’s a dick.”

Beta’s teeth flash with a quick smile. “After that,” he finished. “I measured out the room. When I couldn’t find a door, I jumped in the river.”

“Why’d you leave Rho alive?”

Beta hesitated. “I don’t know,” he says, and his face twists painfully. “I guess I just felt like taking pity on him. We got dumped in this hell hole and as far as we knew, there was no way out. I’d figure he’d either die or follow me.”

“So it was a test.”

Best shrugs. “I’m not sure. I just—didn’t want to kill him.” 

I glance over at Sigma quickly. “I know what you mean.”

Beta smiles again, smaller this time. I always liked Beta. we both took our training seriously and worked hard to get our position. Any hard feelings about our placement had long since faded. I respected Beta for his skill and he respected me for mine. It almost makes me sad to see him down here; it proves that he didn’t pass the labyrinth and that some other, lesser member of the  _ Elitia _ earned the title that should have gone to one of us. Still, I’m happy that he’s here. I’m happy that I’ve found my friend—and an ally. 

“I had a vision from the Masters,” I say quietly. 

Beta sucks in a breath. “What did they want?”

“For me to kill the emperor.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Any instructions on how to do that, exactly?”

“Just that I need to escape this place—they called it the  _ Sicarii Palatio _ —find the emperor, gain his favor—”

“And then off him.”

“All in the name of the Masters.”

“Fuck them,” Beta curses, low and quick. My brows shoot up. 

“Something you want to share with the class, B?” I ask. 

Beta scowls. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I get why you have to do it, I really do, but...come on, Alpha. Can they never give us an easy task?”

“Us?”

He hesitates a moment. “They sent me a vision too. They...asked me to help you when you came to me. They said if I did, I would be rewarded greatly. Forgiven.”

I lean forward and give him a quick hug at that. “Thank you,” I whisper in his ear. 

He pulls away quickly. “I’m not doing this for you.”

“I know.”

His eyes meet my own and he nods. We understand each other, then, just as we always have. We have to regain the Master’s favor. Without it, we’re...nothing. Just two teenagers who have an uncanny talent for killing. We were nothing before the  _ Elitia  _ and without them, without the prize we were working for, we’re nothing once more. 

And after being something for so long, after being Alpha and Beta, the best and her second, we never want to go back to that life of nothing ever again. 

If he had volunteered to help without looking out for himself, I would be uneasy. It wouldn’t feel honest. Wouldn’t feel like the Beta I know so well. 

“I killed Kappa.” I say quietly. “And she let me. I failed her too.”

“Did you hesitate?” He asks. 

I shake my head once. “No, it was quick—clean.”

“Good,” he breathes. “Good. She wouldn’t have wanted you crying over her.”

“She would have been disappointed that it was for nothing.”

“You’ll redeem yourself, Alph,” Beta says. He pats my shoulder gently. 

“Eta?” I ask. I’ve guessed by now that who the Masters would have placed in the ring with Beta. His girlfriend of however long. Ironically, the two only met because he was dating me and she was in my room. For a long time they had just been friends and he dated Omega but after...after the fallout of that, I guess that friendship had grown into something more. I had never understood it; how could people date and form relationships in the  _ Elitia  _ when we all knew that it would end with only one survivor? My focus had always been on winning. A relationship was a distraction from that. It was why, after Beta, I had always stayed away from all that drama. 

Besides me now, Beta looks miserable, eyes not focused on anything, and I know he’s remembering that day in the ring. The soft feel of sand beneath his boots, the familiar grip of the knife in his hand, the beat of the sun on his back. 

“She fought like hell,” he whispers. “But eventually I beat her down. The look of her hate in her eyes as I delivered the last blow…”

“But you met them,” I say. “You did right by her in that.”

He draws a shaky breath, but smiles. “It’ll haunt me for the rest of my life.”

“Then make it right.” I say. “Don’t let her die for nothing.”

He nods slowly and stands and I join him as we stare down at the two boys unconscious at our feet. We’ve tied them up using parts of the sleeves we’d ripped from Beta’s jacket. They’re good, strong knots, and I’m confident that they’ll hold. 

“Anything you want to explain?” Beta asks, jerking his head at them. 

I shrug, uncomfortable and reluctant all of a sudden to tell Beta about the time Sigma and I were together. “I ran into Sigma when I woke up. Beat him up, figured out he had no answers, decided to work with him. There was a door on our side and we went through it and followed the path until the path changed. Ran into Rho. Came back to the room on your side, came out via the river.”

I look at Beta for a solid minute and he stares back at me. 

“Anything else?” He asks. 

“No.”

He glances down at Sigma and then back up at me. “The reasonable thing to do would be to kill them.”

“I know.”

“We don’t need them.”

“Probably not.”

“But you wanted to let them live.”

I hesitate, but I shrug it off. “We’re already in hell. They’ll die soon enough on their own.”

“Alpha.”

“Beta.”

Beta cocks his head to the side and studies me like if I’m a particularly difficult problem that the Masters have set before him to solve. 

“You trust him.” He says at last. 

I shrug again. “I guess.”

Beta snorts, but doesn’t push the issue. “Just make sure you know what you’re getting yourself—getting us—into.” He says quietly. 

I don’t respond, because honestly, for once, I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re getting into. I don’t know how we’ll escape the  _ Palatio _ . I don’t know how to find the emperor. I don’t know how to get close enough to him and to gain his trust enough for me to get the opportunity to kill him. I don’t know why I’m sparing Sigma, and, most of all, I don’t know why I’ve instinctively chosen to trust him. I don’t know why it terrifies me to lose his trust. I look away from the two prone forms with a tight swallow. 

I say, “I’m going to check out the halls. Shout if you need me.”

Beta doesn’t move to stop me as I walk away. 

OOO

The mirrors never end. The path twists and turns—something that took my a few run-ins with the wall to figure out—but no matter where I turn, there are mirrors reflecting everything back at me. I can still see Beta and Sigma and Rho reflected somewhere in the recesses of this mirror world, but I’ve gone a ways away from them, found my own little corner of peace. It’s tempting to want to sit down and take a minute to think, but I told Beta that I would patrol the halls, and I want to at very least keep up appearances. 

Before, we were made blind by darkness, sensory deprivation. Now, surrounded by mirrors, it’s sensory overload. And the light...I can see, but I don’t know how. There’s no definitive light source. It drives me mad; I can’t tell for certain where the walls are, where’s the end, where’s the beginning. Even how big the space is. 

Everywhere I look, the mirrors stretch back an infinity that trails away into pinpoints of light. I lean my head back to look up and above me, my face stares back, face blank of answers. We have at most, three days to find the exit. Sigma and I gained some time when we swallowed water just as much as we kept our head above it and our clothes are currently drenched enough that we can salvage some drops from there, but Beta’s clock has to be running low. We need food. We need water. We need to escape this hall of mirrors. 

But that’s just the problem: in a place where I can see everything, I can’t seem to see a place out. I need to talk to Beta more. I need to know what he’s seen down here while we were exploring the dark hallways above. I stretch out my fingers, brush them against the hand of the girl who stares back at me in the mirror. We’re both trapped, in our own ways, with no hope of escape. 

“Alpha!” Beta’s voice rings through the corridors and I spin around quickly, trying to find the right path that will take me back to him. It’s so easy to get lost here, in a place where you can see everything. So damn easy. My boots skid over the slick surface, slipping a little on the little drops of water that I left behind as I came this way before. 

It takes me awhile to get to him, too long, considering how long I was gone and how far I went. I run into too many walls and spend too much time figuring out how to know which ways are clear, but I get there eventually, panting a little from the effort. I’m weak from lack of sleep and food and water. We need to get out of here. We need to be able to rest. 

Sigma and Rho are awake when I reach Beta’s side. He’s pulled Rho against one wall and Sigma against the other; keeping them separated so they can’t work at each other’s knots, or, so that if one of them does get free, they’re divided and easy to take down again. Rho’s glaring at Beta, but at my appearance, his eyes flick to me. They crow of betrayal and self-righteous attitude of someone who’s been proven correct. I resist the urge to spit at him. 

Sigma, on the other hand, is calmer. He’s not overjoyed to be tied up, but he doesn’t look as angry as Rho either, which is surprising, given how trusting I think he is. I’d have thought he’d feel the sting of my betrayal a little bit stronger. But then again, it’s Sigma, and in the short time I’ve known him, the read I’ve gotten on his character has been positive. Trusting. Forgiving. Kind. I crouch down next to him. 

“I should probably explain myself.”

He blinks. Face blank; completely unreadable. For all I know, he could be seething with fury inside. I’m just going to have to trust that he’s not. 

I glance back at Beta and he nods at me quickly before he grabs Rho’s collar and drags the other boy away, back down the hallway I hadn’t explored. Beta stays calm ever as Rho bucks and screams into his muffle and I watch the calamity with an equally stoic face until the pair have gone off aways. Then I turn back to Sigma. 

He takes a deep breath after I rip off the fabric I’d help Beta tie tightly around his mouth, but doesn’t say anything. He just tilts his head to rest against the wall and stares at me with the most beautiful green eyes I’ve ever seen. 

I don’t know how it is that I ever forgot Sigma’s face. How I forgot the exact color of his dark hair and the way it sticks out a little around his temples and the base of his neck. How I forgot his pale skin and the knuckles marred with scars. How I forgot the exact shade of jade his almond-shaped eyes are; not just green but a little blue and a little grey and smudgy now that he’s tired. 

Seeing it all now is like revisiting a familiar daydream. It’s the sensation of seeing something and knowing that it’s home. 

Which is impossible. I never spoke to Sigma until we were imprisoned together. Never trained with him. Never knew him. But there it is; that familiarity. Like if some final, essential piece has fallen into place. What that piece is, I have no clue, but it reminds me of Kappa. Of the comfortable weight and feel of my dagger in my palm. Of the taste of warm bread. 

I settle down next to him and try to find the right words. I need him to understand; I want him to be able to understand. And yet…

“I’m not sorry,” I say. “That I lied.”

He blinks again, not focused on me, but on our reflections in the floor; a million versions of Alpha and Sigma beneath us, trying to have an impossible conversation. It’s not a call continue, but he’s not trying to stop me either. I take an unsteady breath. 

“I woke up, and I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know if I had failed the labyrinth or if it was another trial and it made me feel...vulnerable. So I did everything I had to to convince myself I had the upper hand. I think I knew even then that I had failed, I just...didn’t want to face it. 

“So I lied. I told you I was Kappa so that you wouldn’t know exactly how good of a fighter I was. So that you wouldn’t make any snap judgements. I let you live, and because of that, I needed to make sure that you wouldn’t turn on me, or that if you did, you still would be in the dark, fact wise, about who I was. 

“I like to think though, that we could work together. The truth is, Sigma, I—I had a vision from the Masters. They gave me a job to do and I have to do it, and I had hoped that you would help me do it. We made a good team. I don’t want to abandon that outright because quite frankly that seems counterproductive, but if you want out, fine. I’ll let you live to figure out how to get out of this hell hole on your own. I’ll let you think it over.” 

I stand,and I’m about to call for Beta to come back with Rho when he speaks. 

“They want you to kill the emperor, don’t they?”

I look down at him quickly. “What makes you think that?”

He tilts his head back to study me. The dried blood from his broken nose mostly washed off in the water, but there’s still ugly bruising around the bridge and under his eyes. At least I managed to set it in the darkness so it would heal mostly straight. 

“You talk in your sleep.”

“What?”

“That night—time?—after we got to the top of the stairs and we took a break before going down the fork. That’s when you had the vision, right?”

“I don’t understand,” I say, shaking my head. “Are you saying you knew this entire time?”

He shrugs, but there’s a small smile dancing on his lips. “It was kinda creepy, to be honest. It wasn’t that you talked in different voices but your voice...changed whenever they were talking to you. It was you but it wasn’t you. And then I figured out what was going on—that you were having a vision from the Masters and that you were Alpha and I was kinda pissed.”

I remember the way he had acted after he had woken me up. Tense. Cold. I had put it down to him spending too long in the dark, but…

“Oh.” I say quietly. 

He leans his head back on the wall, not looking at me anymore, focused on his hands. “Yeah. I didn’t know what to think. You’re, well, you know what you are. You were supposed to win and it was kinda shocking that you were down here with me—the Sigma—instead. That you hadn’t said ‘screw it’ and just killed me. It was bitterly ironic and the more I thought about it the more I wanted to laugh about how messed up the situation was. Alpha and Sigma; the most unlikely pairing of all time.”

I settle quietly down next to him. “So now what do you think?”

When he turns those mossy green eyes on me—so studying, so discerning—it’s an effort to keep my breathing even. It’s strange—besides the Masters, I don’t think I’ve ever cared this much about what someone else thought of me. 

“You’re doing this to redeem yourself.”

Not a question, but I shrug anyways and busy myself with the fraying edge of my jacket sleeve.

“You don’t have to,” He whispers, pleads.

I draw a deep breath. I still can’t bring myself to look at him. “Yes, I do.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see him open his mouth to say something, but I cut him off, calling Beta’s name as I climb to my feet. I can still feel Sigma’s eyes on me and I can tell that he’s going to reopen this conversation the next time he gets the chance, but Beta’s already coming around the corner with a very stormy looking Rho and I know that I’m not going to give him the opportunity for a while. Beta raises his eyebrows at me in a silent question and I glance back down at Sigma. 

“So are you in or out?”

He gives me a measured gaze. “In.”

“Good.” I turn back to Beta and Rho. 

‘Here’s the deal,” I tell Rho. “You can ask Sigma for details later if you feel like it, but the three of us—” I pause to gesture between myself, Beta and Sigma “— are going to break out of here and then go kill the emperor. Now, you can choose to walk away and that’s fine, we’ll let you live to do that, or you can stay with us and help. I don’t care what you choose so long as you choose it quickly because we’re on a ticking clock here and I don’t have time to wait around for you.”

Rho’s eyes flit to Sigma. “You’re really going to help these bastards?”

“Yeah.”

Rho snorts. “Fine. But I reserve the right to walk away any time I please.”

Beta, still holding his bonds, shrugs. “Do what you want but know that after a certain point walking away means dying.”

“Why? For sport?”

I walk up to him slowly. “So that you can’t tell anyone what we’re doing. So you can’t get in our way. Now, can we trust you without the bonds not to try and hurt yourself or do we have to leave them on a while longer?”

Rho meets my eyes and we stare at each other for a minute, him assessing my will, me demonstrating my refusal to compromise. 

“You can let me go.”

“Good. Kill Beta while I’m gone and I’ll kill you.”

“Where are you going?” Sigma asks. He hasn’t moved. 

Beta chuckles. “To explore. Alpha likes to see things for herself.”

I roll my eyes but keep walking past Beta and Rho. I’ll ask Beta for his view on things when I get back, but for now, I need to be alone again, to keep turning some ideas over my head. I can’t help but feel like the  _ Palatio _ is another test I have to pass. A physical riddle. And I’m going to get it. I will. No one can stop me, not this time. 


	9. Chapter 9

 

Beta gives me the lowdown of what he had seen of this section of the  _ Palatio _ when I get back. Sigma’s sleeping. Rho is quietly fuming. I ignore them both. From the sound of it, Beta’s experience lines up perfectly with what I’ve seen. Mirrors everywhere, placed at sixty degree angles to perfectly reflect the idea that we’re not in a hallway, but a large chamber. Mirrors on the floor. Mirrors on the ceiling. No visible exits. 

I’m starting to wonder how big the Palatio is. Sigma and I walked miles upon miles, but the path twisted and turned a lot. It’s impossible to tell how big the space really was, especially since I’m not certain if this mirror maze is below that black labyrinth or not. I’ve looked, and I have no idea where this section connects to the last. It’s illogical, but it’s there. For all that we can see now, we’re as blind as ever.

“Do you think it circles around?” I ask. 

Beta looks down where I’m sitting from his place leaning against the wall. 

“What?”

“This mirror maze,” I say, gesturing vaguely around us. “Do you think it has a definitive end and beginning or is it just one big circle?”

“It’s possible. I haven’t seen any exits while I’ve wandered.”

“And you were here when we showed up.”

Beta shakes his head. “No--it’ not like I walked in a loop. I’ve been staying here as a base since I arrived, exploring progressively farther every time I went out.”

“Why did you keep coming back?”

He shrugs. “Seemed like the safest bet at an exit. If I arrived here, then I should be able to go back from here.”

“But there’s nothing.”

“Exactly. I’ve been trying to figure that one out but so far…” He shrugs again. 

I tilt my head to look back up at the ceiling. Above me, another Alpha tilts her face to look down at me. “How tall is it?”

“What?”

“Floor to ceiling height. How tall is it?”

He studies it critically. “Taller than I can jump. Why?”

“What if there’s a trap door?”

Beta gives me a funny look. “Don’t you think we would have, uh...noticed? I mean, the impact alone…”

I brush away his doubts with a wave of my hand. “Do you have any other ideas? And it’s not like we were conscious or you were present when it happened to know for sure.”

He shakes his head. “It just doesn’t add up, Alph.”

“It makes more sense than anything else I’ve come up with. And it’s the only way there could be an entrance that would prevent us from returning to the Black Labyrinth.”

“Black Labyrinth?”

“The last section.”

“Oh. But why wouldn’t they want us to go back?”

I shrug. “Maybe it’s like the trials. Maybe they want to force us forwards. Test us.”

“Why?”

I huff out a breath. “We were supposed to die.”

“Yeah, I get that. We lived. Yoo hoo. Where are you going with this?”

“Sigma suggested that they were trying to make an army.”

“Who?”

“The Masters,” I say. Sigma didn’t know for sure then, but in the context of everything else, what they’ve asked me to do, it makes sense. 

“Why?”

“To overthrow the Emperor.”

“Why?”

“They told me he had failed them somehow.”

“So they need an army to do that? I don’t know; I seem to recall them only asking you to assassinate the emperor. And you usually only need one person to kill someone.”

I can’t help but growl in frustration. It’s hard to see into the Masters’ motives for anything. I guess that’s why Beta and I have just ignored questioning them all together for so many years. We didn’t need to know why we were doing something to maintain our positions. We just needed to be able to do it. It was always Delta or Epsilon that started off the questioning and Beta and I were always the ones to remind them that no matter how many questions you asked, you could never get reasonable answers. 

“I don’t know, Beta, I’m just telling you what I think!” I shout. 

Beta’s brows raise ever so slightly. In the mirror, I watch Rho sit up a little straighter and shake Sigma awake. Beta watches too and he leans in close before he speaks again. 

“No need to get all shaken up,” he mutters. “You want to test the ceiling where we came in, we’ll test the ceiling. In the meantime, we need to figure out what to do about these two.”

I glance at Sigma in the mirror. Rho’s glaring openly, but I can tell that Sigma’’s trying to watch without being obvious about it. 

“I trust Sigma.” I say quietly. “He seems like a good guy. Don’t know how he survived the _ Elitia  _ but he’s not too bad.”

“And Rho?”

“Would stab us in the back if he got the chance, even if Sigma likes him.”

“So keep an eye on him is what you’re telling me?”

“Yeah,” I say, turning back to look at Rho. “Keep an eye on him.”

Beta claps and rubs his hands together with a smile. The picture of a schemer. I know he’s just bracing himself to deal with Rho and Sigma, but I lift the corner of my mouth up in a returning smile anyways and we walk over. 

Beta hates people. Or rather, it’s not that he hates people as much as he hates people who get in his way. It just so happens that most people have the tendency, in their blissful ignorance, to get in Beta’s way. Beta does not like to be micromanaged. He does not like to be questioned by people he doesn’t know and thus doesn’t respect. Beta does not having to do anything he doesn’t want to do and will grumble about having to do something the entire time you make him do it. Beta does not like dealing with people who cannot grasp the concept quickly. Beta does not like people who don’t understand sarcasm. Beta does not like people who are ignorant of the world around them. 

Besides that, Beta is a wonderful person and incredibly easy to work with.

Just so long as you, you know, fit into the narrow remaining category of people that Beta can tolerate.  

“Alright, boys, we’re going to measure the ceiling.”

Rho quirks a brow. “Which one of you dumbasses came up with that idiotic plan?”

I scowl. “Doesn’t matter. We need to do it?”

“Why?”

“Trapdoor.”

I can’t help but glance sharply down at Sigma when he speaks. I honestly wasn’t expecting him to reach the same conclusion that I had. Even Beta couldn’t do that, and Beta’s well, Beta. Sigma meets my gaze evenly. 

“That’s what you think, isn’t it?” He asks. “That there’s a trapdoor in the ceiling that we came though?”

I nod. “How--how’d you..”

“You’re not the only one who learned from the  _ Elitia _ , princess,” Rho sneers. 

“She is the first one to come up with it though, Rho,” Sigma says quietly. I watch as he pulls himself to his feet. “And it’s better than any idea that you’ve come up with so cut her some slack. It’s not a crime to be smart.”

Rho rolls his eyes, but he tolerates the reprimand. Probably because it’s from Sigma. Probably because he’s used to it. 

“So how we going to do this?” Rho asks Beta. I step back to watch them work, but Rho’s eyes flick to me anyways. “Little lady going to climb on someone’s shoulders?”

I keep my face calm even as my stomach drops out. I could do it. I’d be fine. It wouldn’t be like it was in the hallway with Sigma before. This time I would be able to see and I would steady myself on that ability, but before I can even rise to the challenge, Sigma and Beta have stepped in for me. 

Beta only shakes his head but it’s Sigma who looks Rho in the eye and tells him no. My heart stutters with surprise. Rho’s eyes turn murderous, though and I brace myself for a fight. 

“Why not? It was the precious princess’ idea. She should be the one to see it through. Or is she too good for that?”

Better for him to think that than guess the truth. I smirk. 

“I’d love to, but it’s so much more fun watching you boys do all the heavy lifting”

Rho takes a step closer to me, nostrils flaring, but Sigma steps between us. 

“Let her be, man,” he mutters. “Bigger fish.”

Rho snorts, but he turns away from me, attention back on Beta. 

“What’s the plan, asshole?”

To Beta’s credit, he doesn’t punch Rho in the nose, even though I know he must be dying to. He doesn’t even roll his eyes. “You two are going to lift me up.” he says plainly. 

Rho raises his brows. “I beg your pardon?”

“You’re going to form supports with your hands and lift me up,” Beta says again, slower this time, like if he’s explaining it to a child. “It’s a pretty basic lift. You did learn that at least, didn’t you?”

I suppress a smile at the jab, as much as I know it’s not helpful. Rho thinks we’re stuck up enough as it is. We don’t need to go on provoking him. 

“I learned a lot of things, piss pot,” Rho grumbles, taking a step towards Beta. “I can show them to you if you’d like.”

“Rho,” Sigma pleads. 

Rho glances at Sigma and then shrugs, like if it’s no big deal. Playing it off cool. “Fine, whatever. Why does it have to be us who does the heavy lifting, though?”

Beta holds his hands up in surrender. “Because you two are pretty close in height. I just figured it’d be easier.”

“Sooner is better too,” I add. 

Rho shoots me a dark look. Sigma sighs. But they do it. They hold their hands out, palms up so that Beta has a place to step. I step forward to spot and grab his ankles when he goes up. If we were doing this right, Beta and I would switch places. I’m lighter and easier to lift, after all, but Beta has stood by my side for years. He knows how I avoid heights whenever I can, even when I know I can trust my bases and have complete control over the situation. This has too many unknowns, and he’s willing to spare me from them. 

Beta takes his step and the boys lift him up so he can reach for the ceiling and see if my theory is correct. As it is, I’m still afraid that I may be right but we’re just pressing against the wrong panel. We can’t be exactly certain that this is where we fell through. I watch Beta as he lifts up his hands, my own securely around his ankles holding him in place. 

Rho wheezes besides me. “How much do you weigh, man?” He groans. 

“Almost there,” Beta calls out. I listen to hear his fingers to tap against the glass and then I hear him chuckle. 

“Right again, Alpha!” he calls. I don’t smile, even though I can see Sigma grinning at me like a fool out of the corner of my eye. If anything, this just presents another mystery for us. 

When Beta comes down, we all instinctively look back up at the mirrored ceiling above us.

“How’d we get through?” I ask. 

Sigma looks at me, bewildered. “It’s a trapdoor.”

“But we’re not all guaranteed to fall on that spot--we would have felt the walls of the shoot otherwise, and the area of the mirror itself isn’t very big. Also, hinges.”

“You’re fucking me.” Rho says. “It’s not enough that you’re right and there’s a trap door? The fact that it’s there  _ bothers you _ ?”

“No, Alpha’s right,” Beta says, waving away Rho’s comments without even looking at him. “We should be able to see the hinges on the mirror or if it could swing both ways, then what’s to stop it from swinging open this way all the time?”

“And the speed we were falling at…” Beta starts. “Would we really have been able to survive a twelve foot drop onto a hard surface like this without breaking the mirrors?”

“So why is the trapdoor even there than?” Rho scoffs. “It’s not like it’s in an easy-to-reach position.”

“And that’s why it bothers me.” I snap. “It makes sense, but at the same time, it doesn’t.”

“Magic.” Sigma says. 

‘What?” Beta and I chorus together. 

Sigma shrugs. “Magic,” he says again. “That’s the only explanation for it--isn’t it?”

Beta laughs before I get the chance to. ‘“Magic isn’t real, Sigma. Everybody knows that.”

Sigma shrugs. “I’m telling you, magic is the only explanation.”

While they bicker, I continue to study the ceiling. It’s too easy--the mechanics of it just don’t work out in my head. Sure, this entire prison may be a test for us, but what does it mean? Why would there be a trapdoor that swings up when we need it to swing down? Could it do both?

“Beta, we need to test it again.”

Rho looks up from where he had moved to sit by the wall. “You’re joking.”

I make myself meet his eyes. “I’m not.”

Rho grumbles, but he comes back over and stands in front of Sigma. 

“I’m telling you,” Sigma breaths, “it’s magic.”

Beta moves to step onto Sigma and Rho’s hands, but I wave him out of the way. I need to do this. I need to see it for myself. I look Sigma in the eyes as I grab his shoulder. “There’s no such thing.”

He smiles as he and Rho lift me up and a moment late, I feel Beta’s hands wrap around my ankles, holding me in place, reminding me that I’m not going to fall. Even so, I spare a quick look down. Another Alpha tilts her head to look up at me, her face blank, the unreadable visage of a trained assassin. Before I can let the height get to me, I tilt my head to look back at another Alpha and stretch my hands up and up until they meet the hard surface of the mirrored ceiling. My fingers push against the glass and the door swings up into a black beyond. As I pull my hands away so I can think about it again, I watch the glass swing down into its place...and then past the edge of the ceiling down in front of me, and then back up. Wobbling. Like if it was on an axis. I reach my hands up again,  harder this time, pushing the glass up higher and then, when it swings back down, lower than before, I grab the edge. 

“Gotchya,” I mutter. 

“You figure it out yet, Alpha?” Beta calls up. 

Alone up here above them, my lips twist into a smile. “I most certainly did.”

I school my face into boredom as they lower me back down. I may be disgraced, but I’m still the Alpha. This victory is nothing to be excited about. It’s a mystery I solved easily, and they need to understand that. They need to believe it. Half of being good at what I do is creating an unimpressed persona even when I’m secretly just as proud or excited about something as the rest. If you act like you’re better than somebody, eventually, they’ll believe you are. 

“So what’s the story?” Beta asks once we’re face to face. Like me, he knows to keep his expression free of emotion, but I can see the joy dancing in his eyes. It may be meaningless, but it feels like we’ve accomplished something big. Now the trick is figuring out how what we’ve learned apply to the rest of this section

“It’s on an axis. When a force is applied, in this case our dead weight, it spins down and deposits us on the floor and then swings back into equilibrium.”

Sigma leans back to look at the tile, which has since ceased it’s wobbling. ‘Why doesn’t it’s own weight on the edges drag it down all the time, then?” He asks. “That force must be sufficient enough, right?”

I spare the ceiling a glance before I look back down the hallway. “It’s probably incredibly well balanced. It’s like holding a knife on the side of your finger--put it in the right place and it will stay horizontal on its own.”

Rho gives me a funny look. “Why would you do that with a knife?”

Beta blinks at him. “To figure out the balance point so you understand the mechanics of your throw. You seriously never did that?”

Rho scowls. “No. I wasn’t a sadistic bastard like you were.”

Beta shrugs loosely. “I guess it’s that kind attitude is what makes you, Rho. The better you understand your weapons, the better of a fighter you are.”

“Killing is different than fighting. And it’s not something to be proud of.”

“So you say,” Beta says lightly. Rho opens his mouth to reply, but Sigma interrupts him before the conversation can turn into an all-out brawl. 

“So...now what?” he asks.

“Now…” I say. “Now I think there are more mirrored doors we didn’t know about, and that’s our ticket out of here. We have to find them.”

“Do you think they’ll move like they did back in the last section?”

I suppress the shiver that runs down my spine at the thought of hallways moving when we least expect them to. “I don’t know. I hope not. I guess that just gives us motivation to work faster.”

“Which way first?” 

Left or right. This is even worse than when we were alone in the dark, and last time, I was wrong. 

“Beta,” I call. 

He knows what I’m asking without me ever having to form the words. “I explored both ways--don’t know if it loops around or not, I never got very far in either direction.”

“Left,” Sigma says quietly. “I vote we go left.”

I consider it carefully. I’m used to being the leader--as the Alpha, it’s the role that’s always naturally fallen on my shoulders--but here it makes me uncomfortable. There’s so much more at stake now than there ever was before, and I need to know I can make the right choice. 

“Rho and I will go left,” I say. “Beta, you and Sigma go right. If you find anything, shout. Or send someone back in our direction.”

“What if the halls shift again?” Sigma asks. 

I shrug. “It’s a risk we have to take. We have to cover the most ground in the shortest time frame, and this is the most effective way to do it. Knock on the mirrors as you walk along. If there’s space behind it, you’ll hear it.”

Rho scowls. “Why do I have to be stuck with you? Let me go with Sigma.”

Beta’s laugh is cynical. “And risk you running off with him without us? No way.”

Rho takes a step forward. “What exactly is your problem with me, Beta? Afraid I’ll beat you up?”

Beta’s smile is savage. “We both know that’s something you’d never achieve in your wildest dreams. And you must really be an idiot if you think I’m going to trust you after everything you’ve said.”

Rho moves and I’m stepping forward to stop him from acting on whatever impulse is running through his brain when Sigma grabs Beta’s arm. 

“Come on, Beta. I’ll see you later, Rho. Go with Alpha. You can trust her.”

Rho barks out a laugh. “Clearly not.”

“Rho.”

Steady, calm Sigma. Rho’s eyes narrow. “Fine. But if that one kills you, don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”

A shrug. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

“For you? Wouldn't dream of it.”

Sigma chuckles as he turns away. I watch as he and Beta start down the hall, the easy way with which Sigma is already falling into conversation with Beta and the uncomfortable set of Beta’s shoulders as he replies. I turn away from the both before the snake I feel uncoiling in my stomach can strike. We need to get going. And although a part of me knows and believes it’s ludicrous, because I will not fail again, I have the eerie feeling that we’re running out of time. 

“Come on,” I mutter to Rho. “We should get going.”

 


	10. Chapter 10

Fifteen minutes in, I already miss the time I spent walking in the darkness with Sigma. We may not have talked all the time, but at least then the silence felt companionable somehow. Like, even though we didn’t know each other, we were on the same team. With Rho the silence is not only drawn out and uncomfortable, but openly hostile, if that’s possible. I had the feeling that my presence was barely tolerated by Rho and that he was spending every moment actively planning my demise and wishing he could kill me without getting in trouble with Sigma. 

Fine by me. If he tried to take me down, I was ready, and I knew I could beat him. I was the Alpha. The first. The best. Rho would never stand a chance. And if he was held back from fighting by some misguided sense of loyalty or something to Sigma, that was his problem. I, for one, had no such setbacks. In the world of assassins, we can’t afford to be tied down by that sort of thing. There was only killing. 

“Say something,” he says at last. 

I glance over at him sharply. “What?”

“Talk. When you get creepy quiet like that I get to thinking you’re about to attack me.”

“I could do both at the same time,”

“I know that,” he snaps “I just--”

“And it’d probably be to my advantage too, because then you’re distracted and my initial--”

“By the mercy of Rashidila. What is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you!”

“You’re the one who’s detailing how you’d be able to kill me!”

“Only because you brought it up! What the hell is your problem with me anyways?”

“You know what I think of you.”

“No,” I say quietly, “You told me what you thought of Kappa for spending time with me.”

He barks out a harsh laugh. “Don’t tell me you were offended on her account. More likely you were offended on your own. Besides, what does my opinion even matter anyways? I’m just lowly little Rho, aren’t I? Can’t do half the stuff that you and Beta can, let alone half as well, right?”

“We never said that.”

“Your attitude implied it.”

“It did--argh. Just because I’m better than you doesn’t give you free reign to be rude to me.”

“You know what, you’re right.”

“What?”

“You’re right. Your skill level is probably just because you trained harder and took a better advantage of all the opportunities presented to you.”

“Well...yes.”

“And see! Right there--that’s why I hate you!”

“Why?”

“The attitude! You just act all superior all the time!”

“I don’t!”

“But you do! Honestly, I have no idea what Sigma sees in you.”

“What?”

“Well, he seems to like you well enough.”

“I get the feeling that Sigma likes everybody.”

Rho huffs out a laugh and I resist the urge to smile a little. At least he’s not scowling anymore. 

“That’s true.”

“Kappa was the same way,” I add. “Very...open minded. She was a lot kinder than the rest of us. She doesn’t deserve your judgement. You didn’t know her.”

He shrugs. I sigh. I wonder if he knows what I did. I wonder if he’s guessed. I don’t care anyways; better that I was the one to kill her than someone else. 

Frankly, I don’t think Kappa would have survived to be the Emperor’s Assassin no matter what had happened. True, she had a quiet steel inside her that enabled her to be just as deadly as she was gentle, but overall, I do believe that Kappa was somehow different than me and Beta and the rest of us. Not that she was a more moral person per se. What are morals, after all, excepts constraints placed on the weak to keep them in place? No, she just wasn’t right for it in the end I think. I think one day being the Emperor’s Assassin would have destroyed everything Kappa valued about herself. I consider what I did to be honorable for sparing her of that. 

Rho wouldn’t understand this, I know, so I don’t try to explain it to him in the silence that follows our exchange. We walk on a little longer, the only sound our knuckles sounding against the glass as we try to find a pannel that might swing open to reveal a new pathway. I’m checking one panel that I don’t expect to lead anywhere but sounded different all the same when Beta’s voice echoes through the hall. Rho and I look back and a moment later, it’s a little louder, calling for me and Rho. Without thinking about it, I head off in that direction, feet carrying me towards Beta and a way out. 

I’m surprised when Rho grabs my arm, eyes suspicious. 

“Wait,” he hisses. 

I can’t help but frown. “Why? It’s just Beta.”

“Are you sure?”

The look he gives me raises the hair on the back of my neck and I wonder for a moment what demons Rho’s mind invented in the hours that he waited alone in the darkness before Sigma and I arrived. I scowl and he scowls back before he lets go. 

“I’m positive and you’re paranoid.” I tell him. I don’t wait to see if he’s following as I move quickly through the mirrored passage, my reflections racing alongside of me. It’s not long before I reach Beta and he smiles a little, excited when I turn around the corner to face him directly. 

“You found something?” I ask him. I slow, but don’t stop. Beta falls effortlessly into stride beside me. 

“You bet,” he says and his smile grows a larger as he says it. 

Sigma is leaning against the wall when we reach him, absentmindedly tapping on the glass next to him. He smiles quickly when he looks up to see us coming and straightens. 

“About time,” he jokes lightly. 

Beta shrugs. “They’re slow. Not my fault.”

Sigma eyes me carefully but there’s a softness there that leads me to believe he’s not as mad about everything I’ve done as Rho is. “You know, B, i can’t really believe that.”

B?

I shoot a glance at Beta, but he’s already moving on. 

“Do you want to show them, or should I?”

Sigma shrugs. “You’re the one who found it.”

Beta nods curtly and walks up to the glass that Sigma was tapping on before. His face is straight, but I can see the pride in his eyes when he looks my way. 

“Wait for it,” Sigma says. 

Behind me, Rho scoffs, but I cross my arms, assess the situation. Beta pushes on the glass and it moves back an inch, enough that he can slide it into a narrow space carved into the wall behind the next panel. Behind the door stretches yawning blackness, familiar to us all. Behind me, I hear Rho step back, nerves getting the better of him. I want to laugh at his fear, but know that it won’t do any good. I was never afraid of the dark. In the Elitia, we were always taught that the darkness is our ally; a gift from Lord Rhythan to help us work. I take a step forward, glance around quickly past where the light from the hall banishes the inky black beyond. 

“Have you checked to see where it went?”

“We wanted to wait for you to first.”

If I’m surprised that it was Sigma, not Beta, that answered my question, I don’t let myself show it. Instead I meet his steady green eyes--uncomfortably close for some reason now that I’ve stepped forward to look through and he hasn’t moved from his post by the wall. 

“Thanks.”

A noncommittal shrug. 

Beta moves to stand next to me and together we survey the challenge before like we have so many times before. 

“Cool air,” he comments, “but stale.”

“Hasn’t been used for a while.” I lean forward to study the door mechanism. “And this will stay open?”

“Hard to say. If it were my design, and given everything else that’s been thrown our way, I’d say not forever. Probably weight sensors.”

“And the door slides back into the wall?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you see the mechanism?” I glance up to check myself, but Beta’s answer supplies the truth I’m already seeing for myself. 

“No.”

I resist the urge to step into the darkness and study the passage better from the inside. While Beta could probably open the door again from the outside, I have a feeling that it will close and lock between us. Altogether, I doubt I’ve been in the Palatio for more than two days, and already I’m wary of its traps and secrets. I turn and look back at Rho and Sigma. 

“We can keep exploring around down here, or we can take these stairs somewhere else.”

“And idea where they might lead?” 

Rho, surprisingly looks at me as he asks, almost like if he’s deferring to my judgement, recognizing that I’m in charge here. I file that away to think about later. 

“None.” I reply. “So that’s they question: you can either stay here, where we have a little more familiarity, or you can head out.”

“Why do you make it sound like it’s an individual choice?” Sigma asks. His brow when he turns his head to look at me is wrinkled with confusion. 

“Because it is,” Beta says. “We’re not going to force you to do anything, but we have a job to do.”

“So you two have already made up your minds then?” Rho says with a sowl. “Typical. Typical reds deciding that they don’t need the rest of the team.”

“It’s not that,” I say quietly. Sigma’s focus snaps to me. “But you’ve expressed, Rho, your displeasure at working with Beta and I  and we have been given a job from the Masters that we’re going to do--”

“Because you’re just perfect little lap dogs aren’t you?”

“Because this is our job and we always do our job. It’s not yours, and if it you’re just going to drag us down, then we don’t want you around.”

“Are we not good enough for you?”

Beta rolls his eyes. “Come, don’t come,” he says to Rho. “I don’t particularly care. But Alpha and I don’t have time for you to be causing us trouble all the time, not because you’re not good enough, as you say, but because, Rho, I’m getting the feeling you would do anything to sabotage us. Whatever you choose though, make up your mind now. I’m not going to wait around forever and nor is Alpha. You too Sigma.”

Sigma shrugs. “I’ve already made up my mind.”

Rho glances quickly at Sigma, then shrugs too. “Good. Come on Sigma, let’s go. I didn’t want to keep putting up with these elitists anyways.”

“Actually,” Sigma says carefully, picking through his words, “I was going to go with them.”

Rho scowls. “You have to be kidding.”

“I’m not. I’ve known I’d stick with Alpha from the very beginning, even if I didn’t know who she was when we started.”

At this confession, my interest piques but I stay quiet, keep my face unreadable. 

“You’re kidding!” Rho shouts. “You’d rather stay with her--a girl we both despise, a girl who  _ lied _ to you about who she was--than with me?”

Sigma turns and looks at me quickly before turning back to Rho. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because she remains my best shot of getting out of here? Because she didn’t kill me when she had the chance to in the darkness? Because I think that maybe we misjudged her and Beta and all the rest before? Rho, please,” Sigma begs, taking a step closer to his old friend. “Put aside your pride. Come with us.”

Rho shakes his head as he backs away. “You’re an idiot, Sigma. You shouldn’t trust her, or him.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see a muscle in Beta’s jaw feather at the insult, but Rho keeps going. “If they kill you,” he says evenly, “you’ll deserve it, and you’ll wish that you had been smart like me.”

I watch as he turns and leaves, and then my eyes follow his reflection working through the passage until I can’t tell where he is anymore.

Sigma turns to me, his green eyes meeting mine, and I can see that they’re filled with the pain of that loss, of losing a friend. It feels foreign to me. Sigma made the right choice, I know, and Rho is just being an ass. I don’t understand why Sigma would mourn that loss; why he’d be upset that he’s removed a negative influence from his life. 

I wouldn’t say that I made a lot of friends in the  _ Elitia _ ; most of my cohorts either despised me for some reason, like Rho, or wanted to be me or, even on some occasions, both, and my own dedication to my training left little time for socialization. Kappa was a rare exception, and Beta too, but I’d never allow myself to be torn apart by the loss of a friend. I expect better of myself. They’d expect better of me too. Mourning is worthless; it’s action that really matters, which is why I turn and study the passage again before Sigma can speak, provide some feeble explanation. I don’t care why he made his choices and I don’t care about Rho. We have a problem at hand and now we have to deal with it. Simple as that. 

I shoot a glance over at Beta. “In we go?” I ask. 

His face is grim. “In we go.”


End file.
